Sean Duffy’s Travel Show Is An Ethical Nightmare

It’s also really boring.

The second episode of The Great American Road Trip, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s recently released vanity project travel show, starts in the massive suburban home Duffy shares with his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine more or less interchangeable children.

Four of those children will accompany their parents on the upcoming leg of their road trip to Boston, and before they leave Duffy has to have a heart-to-heart with Paloma, his 17-year-old daughter. The family will soon be visiting colleges and the Transportation Secretary is worried. “Let’s say you got into Harvard, would you be pushing us to actually have you go?” Duffy asks.

Paloma, sitting across a massive kitchen island from her father, answers yes as the first notes of foreboding music begin to play in the background. This conversation is not just about where Paloma will go to college. After years of raising their children as devout Catholics, the Duffys are worried about what a single semester at a liberal college could do to their daughter’s faith. This tension is stretched into a full-fledged storyline over the course of the six-part series, a twist on a coming-of-age tale. Paloma wants to grow and change; her parents have other plans.

The camera then cuts to Rachel Campos-Duffy in a jarring nod to the aggressive editing style that characterizes most reality TV. “We spent a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids, giving them an environment where they’re steeped in faith and values,” a strangely barefoot Campos-Duffy says while curled up on the couch beside her husband. “And so the idea of dropping her off at a place that would undermine that, or try to undo all those things makes me worried.”

Speaking to Paloma, Duffy is less diplomatic about what he’s really worried about. “They have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you, and, I think, corrupt their minds,” he says. It’s a sinister, if vague, allegation that a Cabinet secretary may want to look into. But Duffy is speaking to his daughter as her father, not as the man who currently sits fourteenth in the line of succession.

Poor Paloma pushes back. “I went to an extremely conservative school in high school, and I’m part of an extremely conservative family. If I go to a liberal setting, that’s a way more rounded education than if I go to a conservative high school........

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