Back to reality for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, right, with his family on the reality show "The Great American Road Trip" in this screenshot from the U.S. Department of Transportation YouTube channel. Credit: U.S. DOT
The trailer released a few days ago looks like any new reality television show. A well-known TV personality and athlete takes his wife and nine children for a road trip cross-country, climbing the Rocky steps and visiting the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, seeing Fenway Park in Boston and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, enjoying water slides and riding snowmobiles, laughing, chatting — and sometimes squabbling.
The trailer even shows a healthy dose of "lows," including an apparent injury and a hospital visit.
But this isn't your typical reality show.
"The Great American Road Trip" stars Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and starts with a visit to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. The show, which will stream on YouTube, boasts corporate giant sponsors, some of whom may have paid up to $1 million, that include Toyota, Boeing, Shell and United Airlines — all companies that the U.S. Department of Transportation regulates. And it comes as Duffy's department faces a series of intense challenges — from troubled air travel to spiking gas prices.
Duffy has long relished the spotlight, especially when it comes to reality TV. In the late 1990s he starred in the Boston incarnation of MTV's "The Real World" and in "Road Rules: All Stars," where he met his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy. Separately, Duffy previously competed as a professional lumberjack and speed climber and ESPN once called him, his brother and his niece "the First Family of the lumberjack universe."
The transportation secretary's more recent television presence, until now, has been more mild, mostly coming in the form of the occasional news conference.
Was that not enough time in front of the cameras? Does Duffy has his own presidential ambitions? What a perfect opportunity to show off his "central casting" credentials to another reality TV star.
In his day job, U.S. air travel is beset by problems, with multiple aircraft near-misses and fatal accidents, including the midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last year, just after Duffy took the helm, and the recent LaGuardia Airport runway crash between a jet and a fire truck. Massive projects like renovating Penn Station remain on his to-do list. And last year, he promised to prioritize road safety, pledging improvements nationwide, including on Long Island.
"The Great American Road Trip" is billed as a "civic experience" to celebrate America's 250th birthday. Judging by the trailer, the self-serving project seems less focused on civics and more on the Duffys themselves, featuring the family's interactions with celebrities and even taking Duffy back to his old stomping grounds — his "Real World" house in Boston — not quite the iconic American landmark.
Add to that arrogance a dose of hypocrisy, as Chasten Buttigieg, husband of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, rightly recalled how the Duffys previously lambasted the former secretary for taking time away from the office to care for his son while he was in the ICU.
More than anything, the tone-deaf Duffy show isn't attentive to its own reality — or the reality of Americans who might be watching. At one point, Campos-Duffy tells viewers to "stop scrolling and hit the road," even as moments later, images of her children, heads buried in their phones while sitting in the car's backseat, flash across the screen. At another, the transportation secretary tells viewers, who are now paying around $4.50 a gallon, to "gas up the car, pack up the kids, get behind the wheel and get out and see America."
Sure, Americans might respond. But only if Boeing, Toyota, United or Shell pay to fill up the tank.
Columnist Randi F. Marshall's opinions are her own.
Randi Marshall is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
