Sean Duffy would like you to watch his family making pancakes.
They have cooked breakfast together twice on national television, once just last month — man, wife, and children, gathered around a stovetop as a Fox News host prompts them to describe this most wholesome of Saturday morning pastimes.
“For us, it’s not just eating the pancakes. It’s actually making the pancakes,” Mr. Duffy said in a 2017 segment, bouncing a baby on his hip as the rest of his kids smiled uncomfortably at the camera. “It becomes somewhat of a family affair.”
The Duffys, who had eight children at the time and would go on to have a ninth, were proud to highlight their unusually large family. Mr. Duffy’s wife rattled off the kids’ names before mixing the batter, noting that two were away at Catholic camp, praying the rosary. When it came time to fire up the burner, she stepped aside. In this all-American household, the roles were clear: Mom whisks and Dad mans the griddle.
As the camera panned out to Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” Mr. Duffy wrapped up another segment in what has essentially been an ongoing reality TV show showcasing much of his adult life.
Over three decades, Americans have watched him evolve from a sex-hungry 25-year-old on MTV’s “The Real World,” gyrating with a woman on a pool table, to Secretary Duffy, a devoutly Catholic husband and father at the helm of President Trump’s Transportation Department, pushing young Americans to have families as large as his own. Mr. Duffy and his wife, the Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, like to call themselves “the longest-lasting (and most fertile) couple in the history of reality TV,” a title they trace to a mid-2000s issue of TV Guide.
With his ascension to Mr. Trump’s cabinet, Mr. Duffy and his wife, whom he met during one of his three seasons on MTV, have now positioned themselves as the poster family for the administration’s agenda to raise the birthrate and promote a conservative view of traditional family values. While the Duffys say the left has embraced a childless existence of matcha lattes and urban farmers markets, they present their way of life — marriage, pancakes and many children — as a far more fulfilling alternative.
“If you make the decision of a big family, I think your kids are better, I think you’re better,” Mr. Duffy, the 10th child in a family of 11, said in a 2023 episode of the Fox podcast he co-hosted with his wife.
At the White House Easter Egg Roll in April, Ms. Campos-Duffy shared a picture of their children with seven of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s kids, clad in suits and sundresses.
“Duffys + Hegseths,” she posted: “Making Fertility Great Again!”
Even as Mr. Duffy, 53, focuses on air traffic reforms — tackling issues exposed by the plane crash at Ronald Reagan National Airport in January — his policies and perspectives are shaped by the conviction that women should be having more children.
Early in his tenure at the Transportation Department, Mr. Duffy signed a controversial memo pledging to prioritize transportation funding for regions with higher birthrates and marriage rates — an approach that Democratic senators have called “deeply frightening” and “disturbingly dystopian.”
As the Trump administration seeks to both exude macho masculinity and encourage men to settle down, some conservatives see Mr. Duffy as an important cultural figure who offers a middle way. A red-blooded American male who once scored with reality TV stars, he is now a devoted dad with his own chicken coop and beehives, publicly pledging his commitment to his wife and their old Chrysler minivan. Like Mr. Trump, who also crafted his image on reality television, Mr. Duffy understands what will get people to turn on a show and keep watching.
“I think it’s part of his appeal: In today’s social media world, he has a very handsome family,” said Reid Ribble, a former congressman from Mr. Duffy’s home state of Wisconsin who served alongside him in the House. “I also think there’s this nostalgic view that America has about large families and the good old days.”
“It’s like a little slice of Americana,” he added.
For years, Mr. Duffy — who declined to comment for this story — put his life as a dad on display to win Wisconsin voters. Now he is using his Insta-ready family to send a message to young, single people across the country.
“If you want to be happy, if you want to be successful, you want to have children,” Mr. Duffy said on the couple’s podcast in 2023.
“If you want to save America,” he added, “have a family.”
A Real World ‘Standout’ Settles Down
When Mr. Duffy introduced himself to America in his mid-20s, he wanted people to know that he liked to have a lot of sex.
His interest in “cute girls” was part of why he wanted to go on “The Real World,” Mr. Duffy said during his audition, sitting beneath bright studio lights in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Asked by a producer how many times he’d had sex in the last six months, he flashed a big smile.
“Three times. Three different individuals, yeah. And three different times,” he said.
“I’m sort of starving right now, guys.”
Over the next five years, Mr. Duffy participated in three different shows and a movie affiliated with the “Real World” franchise, a cultural phenomenon that captivated millions of young people and pushed the bounds of sexual content on television. He was selected from a pool of thousands of applicants, through a process a producer described as “more competitive than getting into Harvard.” The premise of the show: put a group of attractive strangers together in one house, and see what happens.
On his first day on “The Real World,” Mr. Duffy informed his castmates that he wanted to be president one day, several of them recalled. So some were surprised when Mr. Duffy quickly embraced his role as resident playboy, debuting a pattern of raunchy behavior that continued all season.
Soon after the show began, he flashed two of his female housemates before grinding up against one woman while wearing only underwear and a winter coat. While the cameras stayed outside a peep show venue he visited in New Zealand, a microphone caught the question he posed upon entering: “Do you get to touch the girls?”
Many of the early seasons of “The Real World” and its spinoffs are not widely available on streaming platforms. The New York Times, with the help of Real World superfans, located all of the nearly 50 archival episodes featuring Mr. Duffy posted on various websites, and purchased a copy of the movie, a mockumentary about a gay wedding that features both Duffys as guests.
Jonathan Murray, the co-creator and executive producer of the show, recalled Mr. Duffy as a “standout” and “clear character.”
“We saw him as a conservative, but very open — very live and let live,” Mr. Murray said, adding that Mr. Duffy was “completely comfortable talking about his sexuality.”
Reflecting on his behavior with women during the season he filmed with Rachel in late 1997, a 25-year-old Mr. Duffy explained that he was just a “playful person.”
“I’ll go and just play with people, in probably a sexual way,” he said, later laughing as he reached for Rachel’s chest.
In the small hunting and fishing town of Hayward, Wis., Mr. Duffy’s Catholic parents did not find this quite so funny.
Growing up, the Duffys went to church together every week — often all 11 of them, lined up in the same pew in button-up shirts and polished shoes. They prayed before and after every meal, recalled Mr. Duffy’s brother Patrick, holding hands as they sat around the dining room table.
Everyone in Hayward knew the Duffys. The kids had the same strawberry blonde hair and wide smiles, sometimes dressed in matching black-and-red buffalo plaid. Several of the brothers won events at the Lumberjack World Championships that Hayward hosted every summer. By the late 1990s, one brother was the dentist, another was the mayor. And when the youngest Duffy son — the future lawyer — signed up for a reality TV show, almost the whole town tuned in.
“I can’t believe you’d disrespect yourself like that. I didn’t raise you that way,” Mr. Duffy recalled his mother saying to him, according to “In the House: The Real World Seattle,” a 1998 book about the show.
His father, a lawyer, told his son to “get the hell on with your life,” Mr. Duffy recalled in the book.
Mr. Duffy did as his father asked, moving back home to finish his law degree. But even tucked away in the frigid far reaches of northern Wisconsin, the lure of reality TV remained strong. Mr. Duffy was a 30-year-old prosecutor in Ashland, Wis., when he rejoined his “Real World” castmates in Cabo San Lucas for one final season in 2001 — competing for the best outfit at a “no underwear allowed” toga party.
By that point, he was married to one of his MTV co-stars.
When Ms. Campos-Duffy visited Hayward for the first time — as an aspiring TV host living in Los Angeles — she described the experience as something “right out of a 1950s movie.” The family spent mornings together at the coffee shop and weekends swimming at the lake.
“I was fascinated,” Ms. Campos-Duffy, who did not respond to a request for comment, said on the podcast. “It was a throwback to another era.”
She married Mr. Duffy in the spring of 1999, already several months pregnant.
The next part of their life together is now part of the family canon, frequently invoked by the Duffys to illustrate why women should prioritize children over a career.
The story begins with a high-stakes audition: Right around the time they got married, they recalled on their podcast, Ms. Campos-Duffy was a finalist for a host position on the daytime television show “The View.” If she got the gig, she and Mr. Duffy agreed, the family would move to New York City. Ms. Campos-Duffy would lean into a new, glamorous life as a TV star, and Mr. Duffy would focus on taking care of their baby.
She didn’t get the job. Instead, the couple settled in Wisconsin, where Mr. Duffy would eventually spend eight years as a district attorney, then another 10 as a congressman. Ms. Campos-Duffy would get pregnant with eight more kids, raising them at home before becoming a Fox News host in 2021.
“Had you said, ‘No, I want the career first,’ you might not have got the second part: the love and the family,” Mr. Duffy said to his wife on the podcast. “But you got the love and the family, and then you worked on the career as well, and you kind of got it all. And I think that’s a powerful message.”
The Duffys see many powerful messages in the life they have created together. Over the years, they have offered instruction on Facebook, Instagram and “Fox & Friends” on how to achieve familial bliss. Ms. Campos-Duffy wrote “Stay Home, Stay Happy,” a 2009 book that advises women on family-friendly kitchen design and how to transition from “mommy mode” to “woman mode” by the time your husband gets home.
In the mid-2010s, the couple considered a pitch for a new reality show about their large family, with Fox as a potential network, said Mr. Murray, the “Real World” producer, whose company proposed the idea to the couple. They asked a lot of questions about editorial control, and whether they could veto particular scenes, ultimately deciding that it was “not in their best interest for the things they were trying to do with their lives,” he added.
When they launched their podcast, “From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys” in 2021, they had nine children and deep concerns about the decline of what they saw as traditional family values. Recording from their brightly lit, white-countered kitchen in New Jersey — where they moved after Ms. Campos-Duffy started working for Fox — the couple, and occasionally their children, would discuss a variety of hot-button issues, setting up the question of the day with a provocative episode title.
“What Do Women Really Want?” (“A husband who wants to be the breadwinner,” said Ms. Campos-Duffy.)
“What Do Men Really Want?” (A woman “who smells like a woman,” said Mr. Duffy.)
“Is Your Birth Control Making You Sad, Fat & Attracted to Beta Males?” (Yes, the episode concluded.)
The Duffys returned, again and again, to what they saw as an anti-family conspiracy sweeping the nation — perpetuated by figures like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Miley Cyrus. In six different episodes, they criticized Ms. Cyrus’ hit 2023 song, “Flowers,” in which the pop star celebrated her ability to “buy myself flowers” and “hold my own hand.”
“If you lead a single life only focused on yourself — buying yourself flowers, taking yourself dancing, waking up late on a Saturday, making yourself a latte — you can present it as very glamorous on TikTok, or in a song,” Mr. Duffy said. “But if you look at studies on who are the most happy people in America — —”
His wife was ready to finish his thought: “Married, conservative women.”
“Liberal women,” Mr. Duffy said on another episode, “are the most unhappy people ever, because they don’t have kids.”
The couple offered a specific game plan for young, single women: Plan a girls weekend in the Midwest. Scroll through listings for local guides until you find a handsome man to take you out hunting, Mr. Duffy said, then meet his friends.
If you find an attractive man who can protect you, “the most important thing you can do is snatch up that guy,” Ms. Campos-Duffy said.
“Marry him,” she added, “and all the other stuff will work itself out.”
Mr. Duffy’s message about marriage and family was similar to past statements from Vice President JD Vance, whose comments about “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable at their own lives” went viral during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Now both men are eager to wield the power of the Trump administration to address the country’s falling birthrate — and, as Mr. Duffy has said, “make families great again.” Mr. Duffy suggested on his podcast that he was interested in a baby bonus, referring to a one-time payment of several thousand dollars that would go out to every new mother. But he also wanted people to know that money was not a prerequisite for procreation.
The Duffys were “pretty poor” when they had their first few children, Mr. Duffy said.
“We didn’t wait till we were like, ‘I got a fat bank account’” to have kids, said Mr. Duffy, who was working as a lawyer at his father’s practice when he had his first child. “We got married, we had kids and we figured it out.”
As they recorded their podcast from their sprawling suburban estate, the Duffys wanted listeners to ask themselves: What are we waiting for?
‘He Understood What Makes People Tune In’
Mr. Duffy began his Senate confirmation hearing in January by introducing his children, reminding the lawmakers three times in the first three minutes of his opening remarks that he has nine of them.
“As the father of nine kids, I think about transportation quite a bit,” he said. “Whether driving, flying or traveling by train, no federal agency impacts Americans’ daily lives and loved ones more than the Department of Transportation.”
The Duffy children sat directly behind him, smiling at the back of their father’s head.
“So impressive,” said Senator John Curtis of Utah, a Republican who has six kids. “You can judge a person by a lot of things, but I’ve always felt like you can judge them by their family and their kids — and congratulations. Very, very impressive.”
Mr. Duffy rode the Tea Party wave into Congress in 2010. He won a district held by the same Democrat for 42 years, promising to cut Washington spending like a lumberjack chops timber. Since that first race, his children have played a crucial part in his political career. He deployed them in his TV ads for Congress, which featured him serving his family sandwiches and teaching his children how to log roll, a lumberjack event he once competed in. The kids regularly attended campaign events, several people recalled — climbing out of the family’s minivan in matching Duffy T-shirts and buffalo plaid jackets.
Mr. Duffy was one of the first members of Congress to start filming selfie videos, said Cassie Smedile, who was hired as Mr. Duffy’s communications director in 2013. He got early attention, she said, for a video he posted of himself cutting down a Christmas tree with his family: Wearing his trademark plaid shirt, he walked into Wisconsin’s Northwoods with a chain saw, a long line of kids traipsing behind him.
“It was something we started to embrace because it was natural to Sean,” said Ms. Smedile, who helped him hone his “behind the scenes” approach. “By having that prior experience on MTV, he understood what makes people tune in.”
Mr. Duffy’s performances sometimes felt out of touch with the daily realities of families in northern Wisconsin, where the median income in Mr. Duffy’s home county is well under $50,000. Talking to a builder about economic hardships at a 2011 town hall, Mr. Duffy, who at the time earned $174,000 as a congressman, told the constituent that he also struggled to pay his bills. The videotaped exchange spread quickly across his district and resurfaced perceptions of Mr. Duffy as a privileged reality TV star, recalled several of his former Democratic competitors.
“Poor Hollywood Sean Duffy,” Mike Tate, the former head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a statement at the time. “He only makes four times the median family income in Wisconsin.”
Mr. Duffy stepped down from Congress in 2019, after learning that his youngest daughter would be born with Down syndrome. He agonized over the decision, talking to Paul D. Ryan, the former Republican speaker of the House, every week about whether he should resign to spend more time raising her, Mr. Ryan said.
“He’s not a faker. He’s seriously authentic — an authentically good, decent family man,” said Mr. Ryan, who recruited Mr. Duffy to Congress and remains a close friend. Still, Mr. Ryan acknowledged that Mr. Duffy likes to showcase a family man image.
“They’re just media people,” he said of the Duffys. “They’ve always been that way.”
Mr. Duffy got to know Mr. Trump as they campaigned together in Wisconsin in 2016. When the two men met in the Oval Office, Ms. Campos-Duffy recalled on their podcast, Mr. Duffy mentioned their shared history as reality TV stars, quipping that he, not Mr. Trump, was America’s first reality star turned politician.
Mr. Trump “did not like that story,” Ms. Campos-Duffy said in May 2023, adding that “he doesn’t like to be second to anybody.”
Mr. Duffy held his eldest daughter’s wedding in 2022 at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J. — inviting the former president to the reception.
When Mr. Trump called for a “baby boom,” Mr. Duffy was all in. The transportation secretary signed the memo prioritizing funding for areas with higher than average birthrates and marriage rates the day after he was sworn into office, becoming one of the first cabinet members to enact an agenda aligned with the pronatalist movement, which encourages people to have more kids.
The idea was to prioritize the transportation resources most important to families, especially big families, said Ryan McCormack, Mr. Duffy’s deputy chief of staff at the Transportation Department. If the department can use a particular grant for either bike infrastructure or highway infrastructure, for example, Mr. Duffy is more inclined to put those funds toward roads, Mr. McCormack said.
“The previous administration was funding bike paths or transit, but that’s not the way that a large family of five or nine is going to be able to get from point A to point B,” said Mr. McCormack. “Inadvertently, the government was restricting what was possible when it came to family size.”
Top transportation officials under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. criticized the policy, questioning how it would work.
“It’s a weird memo that seems to try to mishmash certain social engineering goals with transportation policy in a way that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” said Adam Raviv, who served as the chief counsel of the Transportation Department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
This summer, Mr. Duffy is staging what he is calling “The Great American Road Trip,” a star-spangled celebration of transportation and family in honor of the country’s 250th birthday.
“Not only do you see your country, but you also get really great quality time as a family,” Mr. Duffy said recently at a kickoff event outside the Transportation Department. “This is Americana.”
Mr. Duffy and his family will leave from the White House, he has said, and travel toward Wisconsin.
The Duffys will drive an American car. They will thank Mr. Trump for lower gas prices. They might gaze out over the battlefield at Gettysburg or the speedway that hosts the Indianapolis 500.
And you can be sure that someone will be filming.
Julie Tate, Dylan Freedman and Coral Davenport contributed reporting. Chevaz Clarke contributed video research and production.
Caroline Kitchener is a Times reporter, writing about the American family.
The post The MTV Reality Star in Trump’s Cabinet Who Wants You to Have More Kids appeared first on New York Times.
