The wife of Donald Trump’s transport secretary lost it after critics pointed out that her family’s new road trip show being sponsored by the same companies her husband regulates isn’t exactly a good look.
Rachel Campos Duffy, the Fox & Friends co-host married to Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, snapped at Chasten Buttigieg, husband of Duffy’s predecessor, Pete Buttigieg, after he derided the couple’s upcoming YouTube series, The Great American Road Trip.
“Stand down, Chas,” Campos-Duffy fired back on X after Buttigieg slammed the show as a “multi-month, taxpayer-funded family roadtrip while gas and grocery prices soar for American families because of Trump’s war of choice.”
“You and I both know that my husband has done more in one year to transform the DOT and ATC than your husband did in over 4 years on the job,” she said. “I still hope your family also embarks on a civic adventure this summer to celebrate America because to love America, you gotta see America!”
The Great American Road Trip is a five-part series scheduled to air free on YouTube to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence. It follows the Duffys and some of their nine children across the country. The trailer dropped Friday on Fox, with Sean Duffy telling viewers he’d fit the seven-month shoot around “moments where I might be able to do some work” as a member of Trump’s Cabinet.
The series returns the Duffys to their reality-TV beginnings. The pair first met on MTV’s Road Rules: All Stars, after Duffy’s stint on The Real World: Boston in 1997.
Buttigieg has called it “brutally out of touch” given that the president’s war with Iran has put national average gas prices at $4.55 a gallon. Other Democrats like California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker were quick to pile on, with Newsom pointing out a number of fatal air travel accidents that took place while Duffy was filming.
Ethics experts have raised further concerns. The show’s sponsors, including Boeing, Shell, Toyota, and United Airlines, are all companies whose business Duffy regulates as transport secretary.
The secretary’s wife was undeterred. She insisted in her X post that production costs had been covered by a nonprofit and that no one in her family had been paid a cent. They did it, she wrote, to encourage other Americans to “get off couches & screens.”
Sean Duffy joined in with his own post denouncing what he termed the “radical, miserable left” for hating something so “wholesome,” “patriotic” and “joyful”. He added that the department’s career ethics and budget officials had reviewed and cleared his participation.
The pushback has coincided with another fatal accident on Duffy’s watch. Late Friday night, hours after the secretary’s morning Fox appearance, a person who had scaled a perimeter fence at Denver International Airport was struck and killed by a flight during takeoff. Audio from air traffic control caught the pilot describing “limbs on the runway.”
It came a day after a Delta Air Lines employee was killed after a tug collided with a jet bridge at Orlando International, adding to the grim aviation record under Duffy that began with the January 2025 collision over the Potomac River that killed 67 people. The Trump administration blamed the accident on Biden-era diversity initiatives.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Department of Transportation and the White House for comment on this story.
