This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy owes his celebrity—and his marriage—to a stint on the 1990s reality show The Real World. Now Duffy and his wife, the Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy, are promoting another reality show: The Great American Road Trip, a cross-country journey to landmarks across the United States with the couple’s nine kids in tow. Produced by the same studio behind The Real World, it has been framed by the Department of Transportation as a celebration of the country’s 250th birthday, and is set to launch ahead of July 4.
In other ways, though, it’s ill-timed. This plea for Americans to hit the road arrives at a moment when about two-thirds of the country blames the president for rising gas prices, and when many are concerned about the high cost of living. (The war in Iran is pushing up the cost of fuel; according to Rolling Stone’s back-of-the-napkin math, taking Duffy’s route across the country would require about $1,300 in gas money.) Duffy was filmed intermittently over the course of seven months, during which time he was the public face of transportation crisesinvolving debilitating staffing shortages and fatal airplane crashes. The series, which will stream for free on YouTube, is positioned as feel-good, family-focused programming. So far, though, it has mostly generated controversy.
Part of the concern has to do with the ethical ambiguities surrounding the project. Duffy has said that no taxpayer money funded the show. Instead, it was paid for by the Great American Road Trip Inc., a nonprofit created last year by Tori Barnes, who has recently lobbied for the transportation industry. The organization’s site lists as “sponsors” several companies that are regulated by DOT, including Toyota, Shell, and Boeing. The nonprofit’s pitch deck, obtained by Politico, explicitly offered potential sponsors perks in exchange for different donation tiers. “Platinum” donors that gave $1,000,000, for example, were promised “up to 6 VIP invitations to receptions, roundtables, or networking events” as well as logo placements in “produced video features.” You can’t miss the giant Toyota logo that fills the screen at one point in the trailer. (Toyota and Boeing did not respond to a request for comment, and Shell declined to comment.)
Duffy has said that his family did not receive a salary during production. A spokesperson for DOT told me that there were 24 “filming days on the road” from September to May (meaning that the secretary was filming during two government shutdowns and the airport crises they created). The spokesperson also sent me a memorandum of agreement between the nonprofit and the department, which was signed in December, after filming had begun, and which DOT claimed was drafted by “career ethics officials.” The memorandum laid out that the “donor” wouldn’t receive “any favorable consideration for any future federal assistance” in exchange for its gift.
The problem is that the “donor” in this case is the nonprofit—but the agreement makes no mention of the sponsoring companies and their role in the show. Those companies, not the Great American Road Trip Inc., could stand to gain from funding this project. When businesses do things that might benefit their regulator, it raises questions about whether they’re getting anything in return. On Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a D.C.-based watchdog group, publicly urged the Office of the Inspector General to investigate the show over possible violations of federal gift and travel rules. An ethical-conduct handbook bars executive-branch employees from accepting gifts from anyone “seeking official action from, doing business with, or conducting activities regulated by the employee’s agency.”
DOT has made clear that the production fell within the bounds of Duffy’s duties as secretary. “Celebrating America’s 250th Anniversary is part of Secretary Duffy’s official duties and The Great American Road Trip is one aspect in support of those responsibilities,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. (He added that “on these brief stops, the Secretary also often conducted additional visits like touring air traffic control towers and assessing port infrastructure,” and that flights to those “official engagements” were paid for by the department.) But the funding for this show raises questions about how “official” Duffy’s work actually was. “If this was, as the secretary described it, work that is important for the American public as we commemorate our 250th anniversary, then why didn’t they just pay for it using taxpayer funds?” CREW’s president, Donald Sherman, asked when we spoke earlier today.
In April, my colleague Michael Scherer reported that the secretary has “maintained an unusual relationship with representatives of the companies he regulates,” an allegation that Duffy’s team denied. This isn’t the first time that the Trump administration has blurred the line between public and private funding. The White House’s new ballroom is being paid for (at least in part) by a cadre of private companies, and President Trump announced in October that an anonymous private donor had given his administration $130 million to pay the military during the shutdown in the fall.
The Great American Road Trip is a reminder that in this administration, entertainment and governance go hand in hand. The ex-Apprentice star Trump has set the example here as the showman in chief, repeatedly elevating people who share his background in television; the health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. even has a new video podcast, which does appear to be paid for by the American people. With his background in reality TV, Duffy is in some ways a natural showman. But this new venture is attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Related:
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
- Why did Bill Cassidy do it?
- Tom Nichols: The Trump counterterrorism strategy makes America more vulnerable.
- Here’s another way America will choke at the World Cup.
- An Afghan family’s flight to safety
Today’s News
- President Trump arrived in Beijing for a two-day summit that begins tomorrow with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He is joined by more than a dozen top business executives, including Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Jensen Huang, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
- The Senate rejected Democrats’ latest effort to end the war in Iran, the first such vote since Trump’s 60-day deadline to seek congressional authorization for the conflict expired. Three Republicans supported the measure to halt the war, but the legislation failed 49–50 after one Democratic senator voted against it.
- South Carolina’s Supreme Court overturned the murder convictions of Alex Murdaugh, who had been found guilty of killing his wife and younger son, ruling that jury interference by a court clerk compromised the fairness of the 2023 trial. Prosecutors said they plan to retry Murdaugh, who will remain in prison because of separate financial-crime convictions.
Evening Read
The Mystery of the Golden Coffin
By Ariel Sabar
In November 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to the United Arab Emirates to inaugurate a new museum—and a new relationship between East and West. The Louvre Abu Dhabi was to become the Arab world’s first “universal” museum, filled with art from around the globe that spanned thousands of years of history. The Emiratis were paying the French $1 billion for the rights to the Louvre name, guidance on what art to buy, and loans of masterworks by Da Vinci, Matisse, and Van Gogh. The kings of Morocco and Bahrain joined Emirati royals at the celebrations, which included a spectacle of costumed dancers and pyrotechnics worthy of an Olympics opening ceremony. In his speech, Macron pitched the museum as an antidote to global conflict and the legacies of imperialism. Instead of taking the greatest works of art from the lands it conquered—as Napoleon’s armies had—France was now bringing its treasures east.
“Beauty,” Macron declared, “will save the world.”
Two days after the museum opened, one of its beautiful objects began drawing attention from scholars, but not in the way that Macron might have hoped.
More From The Atlantic
- The AI backlash could get very ugly.
- The Democrats can’t let go of racial preferences.
- The David Frum Show: What happens if the U.S. defaults?
- The close, prolonged contact myth
Culture Break
Read. What happens when the tradwife dream goes wrong? Sophie Gilbert explores how the hit novel Yesteryear seems to be a withering critique of influencers—but is actually more attuned to the corruptions of power.
Pick up an old favorite. Anna Holmes on what adults lose when they put down children’s books.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The post The Murky Ethics of Sean Duffy’s New Reality Show appeared first on The Atlantic.
