Highlights
- Sean Duffy filmed a 5-part family reality show across nine states over seven months while serving as Transportation Secretary.
- The Great American Road Trip celebrates America’s 250th anniversary and drops in June on YouTube.
- Critics slammed the reveal as tone-deaf, with gas prices averaging $4.54/gallon nationally amid the Iran war.
Transportation Secretary, and former cast member of The Real World, Sean Duffy dropped a bombshell on Fox & Friends Friday morning (May 8, 2026), casually revealing that he had spent parts of seven months filming a reality show with his family while simultaneously serving as one of the most senior officials in the Trump administration. Only in 2026, folks.
The show, titled The Great American Road Trip, is a five-part series that follows Duffy, his wife and Fox News co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children as they cruise across America ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary this July. The White House was their first stop.
“Over the course of seven months, we just kinda found these moments where I might be able to do some work, I could take the kids with me, do a road trip, and our motto is, to love America is to see America,” Duffy said after the show’s trailer aired on-screen, somehow making a Cabinet-level side hustle sound like a Pinterest board.
The Duffys are no strangers to cameras. The couple originally met as cast members on MTV’s Road Rules: All Stars back in 1998, which, if nothing else, makes this the longest-running reality TV origin story in Washington history.
“Rachel and I actually met on a road trip on a reality TV show,” Duffy told Fox & Friends. “And so 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.”
Rachel was equally effusive, noting that despite years of offers from producers, this was the project that finally got a yes.
“For the last, I mean, we’ve been married 27 years,” Campos-Duffy said. “We’ve had dozens of reality TV people come to us and say, ‘We want to do a show with your family.’ We’ve always said no.”
What changed? A presidential nudge. “And then when the president said to Sean and all the Cabinet members, do something to celebrate America, and Sean said, ‘We’re going to do the road trip,'” she added.
The show is a Department of Transportation initiative, developed in partnership with the Great American Road Trip organization. A DOT spokesperson told The Daily Beast that “production costs were paid for by the Great American Road Trip, Inc., not taxpayers,” and that “the Secretary and his family do not receive any financial compensation.” The series premieres in June on its own website and YouTube.
But the timing? That’s where things get bumpy.
With gas prices averaging $4.54 per gallon nationally — some 50 percent higher than before the U.S.-Iran conflict began — encouraging Americans to hit the open road is, to put it charitably, a tough sell. Duffy addressed the elephant in the room with perhaps the most breezy line of his tenure: “It fits any budget to do a road trip.”
The internet did not receive that graciously.
Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, husband of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, brought receipts and heat in equal measure, writing on X: “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.” He added: “How much more unfocused, unserious, and out of touch can you be?”
A former DOT digital director also weighed in: “Using taxpayer dollars and federal staff resources to produce what is essentially a reality TV show for a Cabinet Secretary is a gross misuse of public resources.” The DOT disputes that taxpayer funds were involved.
Campos-Duffy, for her part, defended the project’s wholesome ethos with remarkable candor. “I’ll be really honest,” she said on-air. “We live in a Pornhub world. This is really wholesome, good family stuff.” Huh?
The five-part series visited nine states and Washington, D.C., spanning Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Montana, Massachusetts, and the nation’s capital — most of them conservative bastions.
The Great American Road Trip begins dropping episodes in June. Whether America is ready to buckle up and enjoy the ride — at $4.54 a gallon — remains to be seen.
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