Anyone who was a fan of the Real World series on MTV remembers Sean Duffy in the Boston house. And you also remember the whole premise of the show was watching young strangers stop being polite and start getting real.
Decades later, as Transportation Secretary, he’s back in front of the reality cameras, this time as a dad. In a five-part YouTube docuseries, he’s crisscrossing America with his wife and nine children in what amounts to a corporate-sponsored family road trip.
You know, that’s what all of us do. When we can’t find the money to go on vacation because of high gas prices, we reach out to corporate sponsors.
For the Duffy family vacation, Boeing, Shell, United Airlines, and Toyota kicked in to pay for it. All of them are regulated by Duffy’s own department.
It just proves that the seediness in the Trump administration goes far beyond the Oval Office.
The stunning conflict of interest is mind-boggling enough on its own. But what makes it truly insulting is the backdrop for the launch of the series. Americans are canceling vacations, rationing their groceries, and trying to overcome the soaring cost of a tank of gas.
And no one on the Fortune 500 list is jumping at the chance to help them.
Sean Duffy, meanwhile, is burning through jet fuel courtesy of an airline his department is supposed to police. And he’s joyously filling up his tank and sliding in a card that doesn’t have his name on it.
And, to add insult to injury, he was on this family soiree while TSA agents went without paychecks and the airline industry unraveled around him.
Meanwhile, major problems still confront the airlines while Duffy plugs his documentary series. Spirit Airlines collapsed, wiping out 17,000 jobs. A United jet shed a wheel onto a bakery truck. A Frontier plane killed a man on a Denver runway. Air traffic controllers are stretched thin.
But in the vanity-obsessed environment of the Trump administration, Duffy isn’t an outlier. He is one of the gang. Team Trump has transformed self-promotion into a full-time occupation and treated actual jobs as a side hustle.
We all know how former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem set the trend. She burned through $220 million in taxpayer funds on an ad campaign that featured her riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore.
This was happening while the government was shutting down and federal workers weren’t being paid.
The production budget included $20,000 for the horse and nearly $4,000 for hair and makeup. What exactly Noem’s wind-blown hair had to do with protecting the homeland was never explained.
Throughout her “starring” role at DHS, Noem took great pains to do her best impression of Miss Kitty Russell from the longtime CBS series Gunsmoke. Only those of us of a certain age will remember the hard-edged Miss Kitty.
And right behind her, though not on a horse but on a fan bike, is RFK Jr., who filmed a 90-second shirtless workout video with Kid Rock — that alone makes your stomach churn. Kennedy was clad in those inappropriate-for-the-gym jeans, with the video ending in a hot tub while they gulped glasses of whole milk. Just typing that made me gag.
Any actual fitness professional watching that clip would have laughed, and anyone who is a fitness freak couldn’t figure out what the point of the bizarre video was.
But that’s beside the point, because while this video was apparently meant to convey something about American health, measles was spreading across the country and vaccines were being canceled at Kennedy’s direct instruction.
The hot tub session had nothing to do with public health, unless you were trying to get someone to intentionally vomit.
And the hits keep coming. FBI Director Kash Patel has been handing out personalized bottles of bourbon engraved with “Ka$h Patel FBI Director” — the dollar sign is apparently intentional. Meanwhile, The Atlantic has reported that his drinking has become a genuine security concern inside the bureau, affecting departmental operations.
His response to those reports? Ordering polygraph tests on FBI agents to identify whoever is leaking news of his drinking to the press. For Patel, it’s intoxication over investigation, and interrogation while imbibing.
The worst part about all of this is that Patel gives priority to partying as he arguably holds the most sober job in government. How those two coexist is mystifying.
Another job requiring complete seriousness is Secretary of Defense. Pete Hegseth, who oversees the most powerful military on earth, seems incapable of getting out of the picture frame when he’s in a gym.
It’s all conceited workout videos that include bench-pressing with his son, pull-up challenges with the always-jeans-clad RFK Jr., and pumping weights with new recruits half his age. His job is to run the Pentagon.
He’s not a trainer at Equinox. He’s the Secretary of Defense.
What unites all of them — the horse shoots, the hot tubs, the bourbon bottles, the YouTube docuseries, and the barbells — is downright contempt for the jobs they were hired to do and the people those jobs are supposed to serve. That would be us, of course, the American taxpayer.
These are not jobs that deserve more than cameo appearances. These are Cabinet secretaries and, in Patel’s case, an intelligence leader running critical federal agencies during a period of economic stress and war.
Real Americans are making real sacrifices while the people responsible for their welfare are ready for their close-ups.
The original Real World tagline asked what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. What a question for Trump and his advisers! They’ve never gotten real, and they’re by no means being polite to the American taxpayer.
When you hire reality stars, podcasters, and conspiracy theorists to run the government, you get exactly what you pay for: a government that treats itself as stars on video and treats we the people as an audience.