Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg ripped into Sean Duffy’s indulgent plan to star in a reality TV series, calling it an “embarrassment to the Trump administration.”
Buttigieg, 44, appeared on State of the Union Sunday, and was asked by host Dana Bash about the heated criticisms being thrown between him and his successor online.
“He’s making videos about you. He said that the, quote, ‘radical, miserable left hates his road trip because they don’t want people to celebrate America.’ Your response?” Bash asked.
“I love road trips. I love America,” Buttigieg began, before joking of his military service: “I actually took a taxpayer-funded road trip lasting about seven months. It was in Afghanistan.”
“This is something very different,” the potential 2028 presidential nominee noted. “This is not about patriotism. And it is an embarrassment to have him going around saying that a road trip, quote, ‘fits any budget,’ at a time when more and more Americans cannot afford a road trip because of the explosion in diesel prices and gas prices caused directly by the Iran war and by the Trump administration.”
Overriding such concerns, Duffy’s pitch deck for the show The Great American Road Trip, suggested that donations from $100,000 up to $1 million would be accepted in order to make his show—financed by the nonprofit Great American Road Trip Inc.—possible.
Duffy had originally gained notoriety on the reality TV circuit, appearing on shows The Real World: Boston, Road Rules: All Stars, and Battle of the Seasons.
Buttigieg raged: “To make road trips unaffordable and then go around celebrating your own road trip is exactly what people are so frustrated about, and part of why the Duffy road trip scandal has been such an embarrassment to the Trump administration is it’s happening at the same moment that Trump is alienating voters by making it clear that he doesn’t care.”
Adding that the MAGA crowd “never misses a chance to show” its ambivalence toward civilian finances, Buttigieg then hammered down into the funding of Duffy’s new show, which saw companies such as Toyota and Boeing pitch in toward the eight months of on-off filming.
“Then, of course, you have the issue of of the corruption involved,” the Democrat said. “I mean, the fact that you have a transportation industry lobbyist running an effort to funnel money from corporate sponsors regulated by the Department of Transportation to pay for this project, is just nakedly unfair, wrong, and part of what people are so frustrated about in Donald Trump’s pay-to-play Washington.”
In a world of AI slop battles, tacky White House renovations, and Mar-a-Lago ragers, Buttigieg concluded: “And I think the third thing that is really on people’s minds is what’s going on over there.
“If they’re doing stuff like this and posting memes all day, are they attending to the actual issues that Americans are most concerned about in transportation?”
