The government’s YouTube series featuring the transportation secretary is slick, well-made and about the Duffys, not the nation.
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Apologies for being so late on this, guys, but Sean Duffy’s reality show travelogue debuted last week when I was experiencing my own American holiday in its purest form, i.e. learning about the War of 1812 while eating fudge on a horse, so it took me a few days to get around to watching “The Great American Road Trip.”
But finally, here we are in a new YouTube series, celebrating the unique wonder of the United States with our secretary of transportation, his television-host wife, his nine children, and his product placements. “Road Trip” is marketed as a highways-and-byways celebration of America’s 250th, but it was controversially corporate-sponsored, which might explain why the Duffys visit that iconic American vacation destination, a Boeing factory, and why Sean later finds himself cheerfully asking a random executive in a hard hat, “What makes a great asphalt company?” And, “Did you grow up in the asphalt business?” And, “Do you fill up all the drums with asphalt?”
Alexis de Tocqueville we are not.
We are … what, exactly? In six episodes, we are the Duffys piled into a series of rental cars, sprinting up the Rocky steps in Philadelphia, skiing in Jackson Hole, sorting cattle in Texas, inching down the Grand Canyon on world-weary mules. We are taking our daughter Paloma on a college tour of Harvard, but we are making it clear we don’t want her to actually go there because “they have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.”
Two episodes in it becomes clear that this is not a show about America. It’s a show about the Duffy family, whose patriarch and matriarch (weekend “Fox & Friends” host Rachel Campos-Duffy) were both 1990s cast members of “The Real World” and who, on multiple occasions, seem like they’re trying to reboot that reality TV career. In the Texas episode they speak of how their next chapter might involve buying a ranch there, and you can feel the hopeful sidelong glances emanating through your screen: Would you watch if we did that? It would be like “Yellowstone,” if “Yellowstone” starred Candace Cameron Bure. My boots cost $7,000.
Either that, or this is a soft launch of a 2028 presidential run. Politicians used to write books to signal their interest in the top job, but this format is perhaps more effective at introducing you to all the people you’d see on the White House Christmas card, if only the Transportation Department’s official YouTube page can become must-see TV.
Paloma’s college decision stretches through multiple episodes. Eldest daughter Evita shares that she is pregnant, and hires a sonographer in Wyoming to reveal the gender on air. Her husband, Michael, is running for his father-in-law’s old congressional seat in Wisconsin. Sean Duffy is a terrible dancer, we are informed, but frankly, when he learns the grapevine at a honky-tonk, he looks leagues better than Pete Hegseth did when the defense secretary performed the same move in a calisthenics session with troops and resembled a dog trying to escape rain booties.
The whole family is telegenic, let me tell you. Every last one of them, from Rachel’s elderly father, who pops in to teach the family to make piñatas, to 6-year-old Valentina, the family’s youngest child. In the Trump administration we have become accustomed to representatives whose presentation is just a mess. Their press releases have typos. The fireworks are four hours late. Someone always looks like Uncle Fester. Their moves are waxen or wooden or herky-jerky or honestly just weird: Footage went viral of JD Vance jogging in Southern California because viewers wondered if it was possibly the vice president’s first time running, ever.
And then you have “The Great American Road Trip,” which is slick, well-packaged, and featuring a dozen compelling personalities, including more than enough children for those of you who might enjoy playing the guessing game “Which of these polite youths is secretly a liberal?” When we joke about having a reality-show presidential administration, the best-case scenario is someone who learned how to string out a storyline on MTV, not someone who whips off his shirt to ride exercise bikes with Kid Rock.
Sean and Rachel, now married for 27 years, seem like great parents and a good hang. While it is their Catholic faith that guides all of their decisions — “My job is to get you into heaven, not to get you into Harvard,” Rachel explains at one point — the Duffys also seem deeply relatable to anyone of any creed who has reared a child. When son Patrick collapses with stomach pain at the Wyoming ski resort, Sean rushes him to the hospital as the rest of the family waits anxiously at the hotel. Patrick is prepped for surgery, but it turns out he doesn’t have appendicitis, he has constipation. Rachel sighs and tells Sean, “S— happens.”
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It turns out, also, that “The Great American Road Trip” is about America after all. But it’s about something more than you can learn on a tour of Independence Hall or visiting an ivy-covered university. It’s about us, the country’s citizens: What the characters on our screens choose to reveal to us, and what they don’t, and how we relate to them as a result. It’s about the feeling of meeting people you absolutely enjoy as people, but whom you know might disagree with many of your politics. This is an experience folks of every political stripe these days can identify with. Would you like to go on a road trip with this family? Sure. Would you like this family to run the executive branch of the United States government? Uhh.
When Sean waxes on about patriotic revolutions at the Liberty Bell, are we talking about the Revolutionary War, or are we dogwhistling J6? The Duffys hope to keep Paloma away from Harvard because they want her to remain a “traditional” girl – but the show is careful to never quite spell out what “traditional” means to them. It can’t mean stay-at-home wife: Rachel is an accomplished career woman herself. Are we talking about LGTBQ stuff, then? Climate stuff? Birth control?
Paloma replies that, if her parents want her to have a well-rounded education and come into her own mind — as they say they do — then shouldn’t she go to a liberal-leaning college? She already attended a very conservative high school and was raised in a very conservative family, she points out, so it seems to her that intellectual balance would come from the Ivy League rather than the small Catholic university her mother is rooting for.
Her parents tell her, no. No, unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Harvard and its ilk are so skilled and insidious that Paloma is going to walk in there with her head on her shoulders and leave with, I don’t know, a bag of gender pronouns and a tattoo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s egg retrieval. It’s too dangerous for Paloma to risk associating with these people.
But if that’s the case, then is it equally risky for liberals to spend too much time with the Duffy family? If I spend too long in this minivan am I going to start writing for the Federalist? Opposing bike lanes? Maybe that’s the whole point.
From what I can tell after skimming some headlines, other critics — the dutiful ones who weren’t eating fudge in Michigan and thus filed their essays on time — have lambasted “The Great American Road Trip” as either embarrassing dad cringe or alarming grift.
Those weren’t my takeaways, though. Rather, “The Great American Road Trip” seemed like an example of a nice family taking the kind of nice trips that any of us would probably love to take our nice families on, if gas wasn’t $4.15 a gallon and we had the paid vacation available to get away six different times in one year. The Duffys, who bicker, make inside jokes and roll their eyes at their parents, are just like us.
Let’s all of us, the entire country, hop in a corporate-sponsored Toyota. We’ll visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a Boeing factory. We’ll marvel at a bald eagle in a South Carolina wildlife refuge and then we’ll have a strangely planted conversation explaining how all of your travels can be paid for with credit card points, if you’re crafty enough. Go to Harvard. Go to Texas. The scenery is beautiful and we’ve got nothing to do but drive, or drive each other crazy, or run out of gas, or swerve into a ditch and wait for AAA and the midterms. Whichever comes first.
