One would imagine that being a Cabinet secretary should leave little room for side hustles that have nothing to do with serving the American people.
But Sean Duffy, President Trump’s transportation secretary, apparently has so much time on his hands that he spent seven months making a reality show with his family.
Hours before a man was killed by a plane when he jumped over a perimeter fence and walked onto a runway at Denver International Airport on Friday, Duffy was on “Fox & Friends” with his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a Fox host, where he chatted up “The Great American Road Trip,” a reality show travelogue with their nine children that will stream on YouTube next month.
During the segment, Duffy never mentioned what the administration is doing to alleviate the pain at the pump caused by Trump’s ill-conceived quagmire in Iran. Nor did he mention surging jet fuel prices or what impact the recent demise of Spirit Airlines, hastened by those skyrocketing costs, will have on the upcoming summer travel season.
But Duffy did claim that a driving trip for a day or two “fits any budget.” Perhaps the transportation secretary hasn’t heard that the $4.55 national average for a gallon of regular gas, the highest in four years, is wreaking havoc on millions of Americans’ budgets.
Then there’s the matter of how a sitting Cabinet secretary had time to spend more than half a year — he’s only had the job since January 2025 — tooling around the country with his family for sightseeing and hijinks on the road.
“Over the course of seven months we just kind of found these moments where I might be able to do some work, I could take the kids with me, do a road trip,” Duffy said during his Fox News appearance.
“Some work” presumably means doing something about the shortage of air traffic controllers and determining whether that shortage played a role in a runway crash between an Air Canada jet and a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport in March that killed both pilots and injured dozens. It should also include investigating a near-catastrophe earlier this month when a United Airlines plane on its approach to Newark International Airport hit a tractor-trailer on the New Jersey Turnpike. The driver was uninjured.
But why would Duffy let any of those things get in the way of a White House-endorsed infomercial — yes, there’s a Trump appearance — for America’s 250th anniversary celebration in July?
No less exasperating and concerning is the fact that Duffy’s jaunt is sponsored by a host of transportation- and travel-related entities including Boeing, United Airlines, US Travel Association, American Bus Association, Shell, Royal Caribbean Group, and Toyota.
With the take-the-money-and-run Trump administration, avoiding conflicts of interests is so 2024. Hypocrisy is also not a concern for this president and his followers.
Along with many other Republicans, the Duffys lambasted Pete Buttigieg, Duffy’s predecessor, in 2021 when he took a four-week paternity leave to be with the twins he adopted with his husband, Chasten. At the time, their newborns had health issues.
“The same Duffys who threw endless fits on national television when Pete was working from our son’s ICU bedside are now bragging about their multi-month, taxpayer-funded family road trip while gas and grocery prices soar for American families because of Trump’s war of choice,” Chasten Buttigieg posted on social media. “How much more unfocused, unserious, and out of touch can you be?”
A DOT spokesperson told New York Magazine that the Duffys were not paid for the show nor were taxpayers billed for its production costs. But that’s beside the point.
Of course, no small amount of GOP outrage was driven by Buttigieg being gay and in a same-sex marriage and the lingering stigma that men shouldn’t take paternity leave. But now there’s only silence as Republican tongues remain locked away with their spines when it comes to every terrible thing done by Trump and his handpicked sycophants.
Meanwhile, Duffy’s primary job seems to be blaming Buttigieg and former president Joe Biden for the disasters and near-disasters that keep happening on his watch.
Duffy first garnered notice as a cast member on “Real World: Boston” in 1997 and later “Road Rules All Stars,” where he met his wife, Rachel, who appeared on “Real World: San Francisco” in 1994. If his blame-shirking TV appearances are any indication, Duffy is better at sticking to a script for his audience — this time, it’s a reality show host turned president — than being a transportation secretary.
In an administration rocked on Tuesday by another Cabinet firing/resignation, Duffy, clearly out of touch with most Americans’ realities, needs to be the next one to hit the road.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.