It's not exactly a mystery why Sean Duffy, President Donald Trump's secretary of Transportation, seems so befuddled and embittered about the backlash that followed his May 8 reveal that American corporations funded a five-part reality television series about a "Great American Road Trip" for his family.

Duffy and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, first became well known as reality television participants on MTV's "The Real World" series and then later as anchors on Fox News, where she still works. And Trump, since his first term, has urged the biggest names in his administration to treat each day like an episode of a television show.

Television shows have sponsors. And the Duffy family road trip has some of the biggest corporations paying the bills. And some of them are regulated by the Department of Transportation.

Trump's administration has always seemed at least as interested, if not more interested, in content generation than in governing. Why do boring public servants work when you can be an influencer on television and social media?

But the look-at-me crowd gets pretty huffy when they receive actual scrutiny. Duffy, in a whiny social media post after the backlash began, attributed that to "the radical, miserable left."

So how did we get here?

Sean Duffy's extensive vacation is being funded by the companies he regulates

The Department of Transportation, on March 6, in a long news release about initiatives to celebrate America's 250th birthday........

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