At least, that’s the message former Road Rules star and current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent by announcing his new reality series as gas hit a national average of $4.49 a gallon.
Over the past seven months, when he wasn’t urging Americans to dress spiffier at the airport, Duffy has apparently been taking in the purple mountain majesties with his wife and children, on a quest to create content that “pushes back on Marxist narratives” about the U.S. The resultingtravelogue, The Great American Road Trip, will premiere on YouTube next month, just in time for the country’s 250th birthday bonanza.
Despite its panoply of sponsors, the forthcoming show has gotten a lukewarm response thus from potential viewers, who don’t seem very interested in tagging along for the ride.
Even if Duffy had launched the project during a time of relative peace, prosperity and normal airports, it would’ve likely still come across as an obnoxious, pointless waste of resources. Doing so at this particular moment, however, and lashing out at anyone who suggests it’s in poor taste, only further calls into question the supposed wisdom of packing a presidential cabinet with TV personalities and podcasters.
Duffy’s sightseeing boondoggle is sadly emblematic of a White House that is deeply unserious. Even when faced with multiple national crises of their own making, many at the top seem to be asleep at the wheel.
“It fits any budget to do a road trip!”
Although TMZ broke the story in March about Duffy returning to his reality TV roots, it mostly slipped through the cracks. Airports around the country just then were descending into chaos as a partial government shutdown left TSA agents without pay, so when the Transportation Secretary was in the news at the time, it was to blame Democrats solely for the shutdown.
Now that the shutdown is resolved, Duffy has taken time away from blaming Democrats for fresh airport chaos caused by Spirit going under, to promote his new show. Last Friday, he announced the upcoming series on X and during an appearance on Fox & Friends, with his wife and co-star, Rachel Campos-Duffy.
Just why has the Transportation Secretary spent a substantial chunk of the past seven months on a filmed family vacation? As he and fellow Road Rules vet Campos-Duffy explained it, in the 27 years since the pair were married, reality TV producers have been banging down their doors, begging them to do a new show with their enormous family. (They have nine children). Ambivalent to the base temptations of money and attention, as they tell it, only when Trump urged his Cabinet members to “do something” to celebrate America’s 250th did Duffy nobly don a lav mic once again to hit the road with his family and introduce them to Kid Rock.
“It fits any budget to do a road trip!” Duffy crowed during the interview, as the average gas price in California spiked above $6 a gallon.
Back in March, when TMZ revealed Duffy’s show was in the works, he would’ve already been steeped in the economic crunch Trump’s unprovoked war with Iran created. He had plenty of time to assess which way the wind was blowing and table his TV show until a moment when reporters wouldn’t be constantly asking him about high gas prices.
Instead, he decided to plow ahead with The Great American Road Trip with no regard for the optics of the timing—and seemed shocked when X users of all stripes criticized him for it.
Too wholesome, too patriotic, too joyful
After a full day of taking flak online, Duffy doubled down. He posted a lengthy screed on X, railing against the “radical miserable left,” as though only staunch partisans could find fault with his frivolous, gas-guzzling side hustle.
He claimed in the post that the haters only objected to his show because it was “too wholesome,” “too patriotic,” and “too joyful.” Despite that framing, however, he still felt compelled to defend himself against the actual criticisms people had been lodging.
He offered a list of five rebuttals, declaring: 1) “production costs were paid for by the Great American Road Trip Inc., not taxpayers,” 2) he had not received a salary or production royalties for the project, 3) the series had been filmed “in short, one to two day production windows,” rather than throughout a seven-month vacation, 4) the project had been approved by “ethics and budget officials,” and 5) he’d been phenomenally successful in his day job of supervising transportation for the U.S., despite spending considerable time making a TV show.
Of course, Duffy’s heated response only invites further scrutiny.
In order to plausibly claim no taxpayer dollars were spent on the show, for instance, he’d have to prove no government staff were involved in scheduling, logistics, security, or approvals during filming, and that filming never coincided with any time technically on the Transportation clock.
Also, in the same way Trump has bragged about not taking a salary as president, despite profiting enormously and directly from his presidency, Duffy could still benefit from the show. He could parlay it into a book deal or a podcast or some other post-government TV opportunity—if a fully expensed eleven-person road trip doesn’t already count as a benefit in itself.
Not to mention it just doesn’t seem right for a U.S. Transportation Secretary to divide his time and mental energy between official duties and the demands of creating a TV show during the turbulence of recent months. One can only imagine the apoplectic response that would’ve ensued had President Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg released a road trip series—perhaps one called Buttigieg of Glory—while in office. (Especially considering that conservatives including Duffy himself criticized “Private Jet Pete” for “jetting off” to the ICU when one of his sons was born with a serious illness in 2021, instead of working in DC.)
And whether those nebulously defined “ethics officials” approved the project or not, there’s still an unambiguous conflict of interest in The Great American Road Trip’ssponsorship. Several of the companies contributing to the show—Boeing, Shell, Toyota, United, and Royal Caribbean, to name a few—are regulated by the Department of Transportation, depend on the Department’s policies, and are known to lobby it for approvals, grants and other developments. Throwing money at Duffy’s vanity project doesn’t necessarily guarantee those companies any future favors, but it does reasonably raise the suggestion of indebtedness.
It doesn’t require membership in the “radical miserable left” to smell something fishy there.
Not particularly good TV
Trump appears in the opening moments of the Great American Road Trip trailer, welcoming the Duffy clan into the Oval Office, so it stands to reason he approved this project.
After all, Trump has unique insight into the power of reality TV.
Despite coming from a real estate background, it was Trump’s experience on The Apprentice that brought him into millions of Americans’ homes, laying the foundation for his presidency. What makes Good TV seems to take precedence in his calculus over what makes Good Governance, which probably explains why he’s put so many TV personalities in power.
What does not make for particularly good TV, however, at least as far as Trump is concerned, is when his people get called out for sticking their nose right in the camera.
It didn’t work out well for Kristi Noem after she spent $200 million on an ad campaign where she cosplayed as a cowgirl, nor did things pan out for Elon Musk after he made a spectacle of himself trying to influence an election in Wisconsin. And Kash Patel’s fortunes remain unclear after he reportedly got on Trump’s bad side by partying on camera with the U.S. Olympic hockey team and becoming the subject of multiple Atlantic exposés.
Excessive displays of personal vanity and let-them-eat-cake obliviousness are only tolerated from one person in the White House, and that person is not Sean Duffy.
If his road trip reality series rolls out this summer while gas prices continue to climb, well, let’s just say he will likely have plenty of time for his next cross-country adventure.
