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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s reality show is an ungainly mix of corporate corruption and MAGA agitprop.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy launched his career in public life as a reality-TV star, and, in the TV-addled second Trump administration, he’s returning to his roots with last week’s release of his family-vacation reality show, The Great American Road Trip. The series had been initially pegged for a June release on YouTube, but the producers sent it back for edits, apparently to ensure that it wouldn’t go too far afoul of federal ethics rules.

The editors needn’t have bothered. The final product, which chronicles the Duffy family’s travels across the country, is a work of free-floating MAGA agitprop without any real dramatic interest, and remains, like most such undertakings in the second Trump administration, a running breach of basic government ethics.

The vanity project desperately aims to depict the transportation secretary and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, as an ordinary American couple even though they’ve both followed the same decidedly elite celebrity career trajectory, leading from reality-TV stints to the conservative mediasphere. Sean had parlayed that résumé into a seat in the House of Representatives and his cabinet appointment, while Rachel became a Fox News anchor.

If you’re thinking this doesn’t make for relatable TV viewing, you’re right. The Great American Road Trip gamely seeks to gin up some right-wing intergenerational frisson by having the Duffys’ adult daughter Evita tag along as part of the show’s contingent of eight Duffy offspring. She’s a wannabe conservative influencer; she’s accompanied by her husband, Michael Alfonso, the former producer for Dan Bongino’s podcast and current Republican nominee for Congress in Duffy’s former seat in Wisconsin’s seventh district. The high jinks and scrapes that this quartet of media-savvy ideologues encounter come across less like the fare on the Real Housewives franchise or The Jersey Shore than a CPAC breakout panel on wheels.

The Great American Road Trip is also a puzzling effort to chronicle the daily life of a powerful cabinet secretary. True to the time-honored goofy-dad conventions of television programming, Duffy comes off as a happy- go-lucky husband and father, but the show depicts his cabinet position as consisting of little more than the offscreen job duties of a sitcom paterfamilias. As the Duffys tool through the American interior, Sean stages a series of meet-and-greets at various factories and cultural events. If this is his core approach to overseeing the nation’s transportation infrastructure, it’s little wonder that the airline industry has faced a historic volume of delays and flight cancellations under his lax supervision.

But the show’s quasi-documentary ambitions are a slapdash afterthought; like most undertakings of this White House, The Great American Road Trip is an opportunity for well-heeled patrons to buy their way into the Trump administration’s good graces. Funded by a number of large corporations regulated by the Department of Transportation (DOT), the series includes entire segments in which Duffy essentially auditions as a spokesperson for the very firms lobbying his agency.

Such set pieces speak volumes about the conduct of regulatory policy in the second Trump White House. The DOT insists that the show wasn’t financed with taxpayer dollars—but on closer examination, that proves to be an empty disclaimer. By structuring so many of the stops along the trip around Duffy’s photo-ops, the show allows Duffy essentially to double dip–using........

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