The Cabinet Secretary Will Now Take a Confessional

I have been parked outside the Department of Transportation since the gas got expensive enough to make parking the cheaper option, and I am here to report that the building is still standing, the lights are still on, and somewhere inside it a man is being filmed.

Not surveilled. Filmed. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole rotten story.

Sean Duffy — the 20th Secretary of Transportation, a man whose actual job is keeping airplanes from finding one another in the dark — spent a healthy slice of the last year making a reality show. It is called The Great American Road Trip. I did not invent that. I want it on the record early, because everything I am about to tell you sounds fabricated and none of it is.

Here is the part they would prefer you not sit with. Duffy is not a politician who wandered onto television. He is a television personality who wandered into government and never fully checked out. The man broke into the culture on MTV’s The Real World: Boston in 1997, a role the New York Times filed politely under “resident playboy.” He met his wife — Rachel Campos-Duffy, now a Fox News host — on the set of Road Rules. He won a season of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge in 2002. The confessional booth is not a place this man visits. It is a place this man is from.

So when I tell you the Secretary of Transportation has a reality show, understand this is not a scandal that happened to him. This is a salmon returning upstream.

The watchdogs at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — CREW, an acronym that sounds like a hype squad and behaves like a colonoscopy — filed a complaint on the 11th, asking the department’s own Inspector General to determine who paid for all of this. And here is the budget situation, with the over/under on a clean answer sitting at zero: the show was bankrolled, CREW alleges, by Toyota, United Airlines, and Boeing.

Read that again. Slowly. Boeing. The airplane company. Underwriting the road show of the man whose department regulates the airplane company. That is not a conflict of interest. That is a conflict of interest doing a televised victory lap.

I have now read the CREW complaint twice and the department’s response three times, and I am beginning to lose the thread — which I suspect is the production design working exactly as intended.

The department’s spokesman, a man named Nathaniel Sizemore, says no taxpayer dollars touched the family during filming. He says an independent non-profit — and I need you to feel the structural load on the word independent — called The Great American Road Trip Inc. covered the gas, the rental cars, the lodging, the “activities.” He says career ethics officials reviewed it. He says celebrating America’s 250th birthday is “part of Secretary Duffy’s official duties.”

There it is. The job is the content now. The content is the job. Somewhere a career ethics officer initialed a form, and I hope he is sleeping soundly, because I am not.

Sizemore added that on these “brief stops,” the Secretary “also often” toured air traffic control towers and “assessed port infrastructure.” Often. I would put the towers-per-episode figure at roughly one, shot from the flattering angle, forty seconds of B-roll, hard cut to the family laughing inside a Toyota. There is a 78% chance the assessment of the port infrastructure consisted, in full, of the word “wow.”

And this is not the first taping. Last year the same outfit staged something called the Great American Road Trip Expo. The venue was the Department of Transportation itself. The guest list ran to nineteen vehicle vendors. They held a car show in the lobby of the agency that regulates cars. The vibes were, as the complaint dryly declines to put it, immaculate.

Enter the ghost of secretaries past. Pete Buttigieg — who held the very same chair — went on television Sunday to file the minimum outrage required to stay relevant, and he stumbled onto the one true line in the whole mess.

“I actually took a taxpayer-funded road trip lasting about seven months. It was in Afghanistan. This is something very different.”

Reader, I do not hand out points to former cabinet secretaries. They are all swine from the same particular farm. But the line landed, because it marks the distance between a man who went somewhere and a man who streamed somewhere. Buttigieg also said diesel and gas prices have “exploded” — his word — because of the Iran war and the administration, and pronounced the whole affair an embarrassment. He may be correct. He may also just be a man with a podcast. In this Republic, both are usually true at once.

Secretary Duffy, I regret to inform you that the camera was never your friend. The camera is a regulated industry holding a press pass. When the airline you oversee is also covering your hotel tab, the question stops being whether you are corrupt. The question becomes whether you can still tell the difference — and a man who has been on basic cable since 1997 has had a very long time to lose the thread of it.

His wife went on the radio to defend him.

“My husband is not a corrupt man. He’s had many years in politics, and nobody has ever accused my husband of that.”

This was said in direct response to a watchdog group accusing her husband of precisely that. The accusation was, at the moment she spoke, a PDF on the public internet with her husband’s name in the file title. But sure. Nobody.

So here is where the road ends. The Republic is now a streaming property. The Secretary of Transportation toured the Mayflower landing site and a Civil War battlefield and Yellowstone, and somewhere in the edit a sponsor’s chrome caught the light. The Inspector General will investigate. The investigation will outlast the show’s production schedule, and by the time it files anything the algorithm will have served us three worse things and we will have forgotten the name of every battlefield he stood on.

I’d put the over/under on a second season at one. Take the over. The towers are not going anywhere, the planes are still up there finding one another in the dark, and the content — the content is forever.

Anyway. You still can’t park here.