The United States Department of Transportation — the federal agency that regulates Boeing — is now hosting a Boeing-sponsored reality show on its official YouTube channel, starring the Secretary of Transportation and his nine children. It features a vow renewal, a bison misidentified as a buffalo, and Rachel Campos-Duffy's unsolicited advice that the secret to a long marriage is marrying someone attractive enough to forgive. America is 250 years old and this is what we're doing with it.
The Show Nobody Asked For, Funded By Companies With Everything To Ask For
The Great American Road Trip is a six-part travel series sitting on the Department of Transportation's official YouTube page, in which Secretary Sean Duffy loads his family into a vehicle and drives around America for three hours of runtime, theoretically to celebrate the country's 250th birthday. According to The Guardian, who watched it so you don't have to, the show was billed as a way to 'celebrate and share America's story' and 'understand the vast, beautiful, complicated place we call home.'
It does not do those things. What it does, with extraordinary commitment, is introduce you to the Duffy family. Their children. Their love story. Their prayer habits. Their opinions on each other's physical attractiveness. The Liberty Bell shows up for a few minutes. Then we're back to the Duffys.
The government insists no taxpayer money went into production. What actually funded it, as The Guardian reports, are corporate sponsors including Boeing and Toyota. If those names sound familiar, it's because they are both regulated by the Department of Transportation. The department that Sean Duffy runs. The same Sean Duffy who is now the star of their sponsored content.
A Ethics Complaint Was Filed. The Show Aired Anyway.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW, filed a complaint with the department's own inspector general back in May, according to The Guardian. The show was originally supposed to drop in June, but got held up amid questions about exactly how appropriate it is for a cabinet secretary's family vacation to be bankrolled by the industries he oversees.
Those questions were apparently resolved in the administration's favor, because on Tuesday the whole thing landed on the DOT's YouTube page regardless. No announcement of the inspector general's conclusions. No public accounting of what was determined to be ethical about Boeing buying airtime on the Transportation Secretary's vanity project. Just: here's the show, enjoy.
Pete Buttigieg, Duffy's predecessor in the role, described the project as 'brutally out of touch,' per The Guardian's reporting. Gas prices are high. The show is about a family road trip. These two facts coexist without any apparent discomfort on the part of the Duffys.
The Content Itself Is, Genuinely, Something
The show opens in Washington, where Trump makes a cameo to wave the family off. 'Taking a little trip?' the president asks. Someone confirms that yes, they are. 'A little trip all over,' Trump replies, which The Guardian notes demonstrates 'a strong understanding of what a road trip involves.' One of the Duffy daughters then asks her younger sister whether the president has pretty hair. The younger one says yes. This is in the show. This made the cut.
In episode three, set in Wyoming and Montana, Duffy gestures at some wildlife and tells his daughters that these buffalo congregate together and are more powerful as a group, drawing a direct comparison to the Duffy family unit. A tour guide named Roy, standing nearby, informs him that those are actually bison, not buffalo. Duffy turns to his family and says, 'See, y'all learned something.' He does not appear to include himself in that group.
The final episode is titled 'Arizona: Family, Memories and the Road Ahead.' In the first quarter of it, The Guardian reports, viewers learn precisely nothing about Arizona. They do learn that it is the Duffys' 27th wedding anniversary, which prompts Campos-Duffy to share that the key to a lasting marriage is to marry someone you find very attractive, because you'll need to forgive them a lot and it helps if they're good-looking. This was filmed, edited, approved, and published on a United States government YouTube channel.
The Reality TV Angle Is Not Subtle
Sean Duffy is not a newcomer to this format. Before he was a congressman, before he was running the Department of Transportation, he was a cast member on MTV's The Real World: Boston. Rachel Campos-Duffy has her own television history. They met on Road Rules: All Stars in 1998. She is currently a Fox News host.
The Guardian describes The Great American Road Trip as 'an apparent government-commissioned audition' for the Duffys to return to reality television, and it is difficult to argue with that read. The show includes footage of the family praying before meals and before bed, which The Guardian notes 'serves no purpose other than to show any watching TV executives that the Duffys can appeal to a religious crowd.' The production quality is glossy. The family is camera-ready. The whole thing sits in the uncanny valley between public service announcement and sizzle reel.
The target audience, as The Guardian puts it, fits into 'an unusual venn diagram of people who like America and really, really like the Duffy family.' That is a small venn diagram. It is not clear anyone asked for this venn diagram to exist on government servers.
The Dingo Take
Boeing is under federal oversight. Boeing sponsored a television show starring the federal official who oversees them. That official published the show on his department's official government platform. And the administration's position is that this is fine, actually, because technically no taxpayer money changed hands. This is like a judge accepting a sponsored vacation from a defendant and arguing there's no conflict because the airline miles technically went to the judge's personal account.
The content of the show almost doesn't matter. Almost. But the bison thing matters. The vow renewal matters. The part where a daughter asks if Donald Trump has pretty hair and it made the final cut of a video published on the Department of Transportation's YouTube page — that matters. Because it tells you everything about the seriousness with which this administration treats the machinery of the federal government. It's a prop. It's a backdrop. It's a place to park your branded content while your wife explains that physical attraction is the key to forgiveness.
Sean Duffy runs an agency responsible for airline safety, highway infrastructure, and rail regulation. Hundreds of people died in aviation incidents this year. The roads are crumbling. And his department's YouTube channel is currently hosting three hours of Duffy family vacation footage, sponsored by the airline manufacturer currently under federal scrutiny. Nobody involved seems to think this requires explanation. That's the part that should keep you up at night.
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