Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been receiving criticism over his newly revealed reality television show, a road trip series that was filmed over the course of seven months when he was also presumably overseeing the entire U.S. transportation system. Critics have accused him not only of shirking his responsibilities while on the taxpayers’ dime, but of conflicts of interest with the corporations he’s supposed to be regulating. On Monday, his wife had an explosive response to one critic in particular: the husband of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“Stand down, Chas,” Duffy’s wife Rachel Campos Duffy, who also happens to be a co-host of Fox & Friends, posted over a retweet of criticism from Chasten Buttigieg. “You and I both know that my husband has done more in one year to transform the [Department of Transportation] and [Air Traffic Control] than your husband did in over 4 years on the job.”
In the same post, she also claimed that the show — The Great American Road Trip — was funded by a non-profit organization, even though, according to the Daily Beast, “the show’s sponsors, including Boeing, Shell, Toyota and United Airlines, are all companies whose business Duffy regulates as transport secretary.” This has ethics experts sounding the alarm.
For his part, Chasten Buttigieg has a personal element to his criticism of the Duffys, posting, “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. How much more unfocused, unserious, and out of touch can you be?”
The Duffys are a longtime TV couple. Sean Duffy came into the public eye in 1997 during the show The Real World: Boston, then met his wife on Road Rules: All Stars. He’s been filming his new series, he says, between “moments where I might be able to do some work” as a member of Trump’s Cabinet.