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“To love America is to see America. It’s more than a road trip. It’s a civic experience.”
That’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy talking about the road trips he took with his family for a forthcoming YouTube series timed to be part of America’s 250th anniversary celebration.
A trailer for the five-part series was released last week, and it shows clips of Duffy and his family visiting Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis and other American cities, and encouraging other families to “stop scrolling and hit the road.”
The video is designed to warm the heart, and it does, especially when 6-year-old Valentina Duffy, who has Down syndrome, hugs a Benjamin Franklin impersonator.
And yet, almost as quickly as the trailer hit the internet, the conversation about it turned acrimonious. The spouse of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg criticized the venture, saying, “How much more unfocused, unserious, and out of touch can you be?”
Chasten Buttigieg and other critics lambasted the Duffys for promoting road trips as average gas prices hover near historic highs, and suggested that the transportation secretary had spent much of the past few months on vacation.
Rachel Campos-Duffy fired back on X, saying that the trips were funded by private donations to a nonprofit called The Great American Road Trip, not taxpayer money, and were done in short spurts of time over seven months.
That didn’t silence the critics, who then questioned whether Duffy violated ethics rules by taking trips financed by sponsors that included Boeing, United Airlines, Toyota and Enterprise Car Rental. Others pointed out that the family was, at least at times, driving a Toyota, as opposed to an American-made car.
Duffy responded sharply on X, saying that ethics officials had reviewed and approved the project. Per Bloomberg, the left-leaning nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a complaint asking for an investigation of whether the series is an “appropriate use of government travel and whether private products were being promoted by the secretary.”
The truth will show itself eventually, as it always does.
In the meantime, consider this another episode in the ongoing cultural series “Politics Ruins Everything.” Because the Duffy family road trip show does look fun, wholesome and engaging, and certainly it’s within the purview of the Department of Transportation to be suggesting road trips during a celebratory year in America, and for the transportation secretary to be touring America by car.
For that matter, Buttigieg, Elaine Chao or any other transportation secretary going back to 1967, when the first one, Alan S. Boyd, was sworn in, could have done the same thing during their terms.
Campos-Duffy told me last week that President Donald Trump had asked each of his Cabinet secretaries to come up with a way for their departments to participate in the America 250 celebration. We can argue until the cows come home about whether it’s a good thing for there to be an IndyCar race around the National Mall, but it seems that we can all get behind the value of the great American road trip.
It’s unfortunate that this campaign landed at a time when many Americans are being economically bruised by gas prices. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted by Ipsos the last week of April, more than 4 in 10 Americans said they have changed their driving habits because of gas prices.
As such, Buttigieg’s criticism that the series is out of touch lands harder than it would have six months ago. But gas prices weren’t an issue when the Duffys began this trip, and viewed outside the lens of politics, their campaign is inspiring. Check out the DOT’s “Roadtrip in America” page, filled with suggestions of fun places across the U.S. to visit, from a theme park in South Dakota based on children’s books, to the life-size replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
It all does make you want to hit the road, though perhaps, right now, in an electric vehicle.
‘One long small town’
So what does it look like when road trips aren’t caught up in politics? Well, people seem to like them quite a lot.
Take the road trip a Los Angeles Times writer took, traversing all 2,448 miles of U.S. Route 66, from Chicago to Santa Monica, in order to mark the storied roadway’s 100th birthday this year.
Christopher Reynolds’ essay is an invitation to Americans to hit the road, with one Oklahoma business owner telling him, “Americana! Road trip! Who wouldn’t want to do that?”
Exactly. Who wouldn’t?
Then there’s “This Land is Your Land,” a new book by Yale University historian Beverly Gage that is also about a road trip through U.S. history. Gage visited more than 300 historical sites while traveling to 13 different places that hold significance in U.S. history: from Philadelphia to Detroit to Montgomery, Alabama, including the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Disneyland.
She begins by talking about George Washington’s travels after being chosen as the first president of the U.S. The father of our country, as it turns out, was also the father of the great American road trip.
“Washington had some ideas. One involved getting to know the country — not as an abstraction (’We the people’ and all that) but as it actually existed out there on the ground, where real people lived,” Gage wrote.
There was, of course, no I-95 or Motel 6, but Washington still “made his travel harder than it needed to be.”
“He decided to stay in public inns and taverns rather than in the houses of rich patrons. ... He wanted to commune with ordinary Americans.”
Ultimately, “Despite all the dust and mud and wretched road cuisine, he came away heartened about the country he had been chosen to lead.”
Gage felt much the same at the end of her travels, writing that she too came away heartened, “or at least more heartened than I might have been had I stayed home, doomscrolling through the news.”
And Reynolds, at the Los Angeles Times, observed at the end of his trip, “in so many ways, the road is one long small town.”
Recommended Reading
Smartphones can enable human connection, Samuel J. Abrams writes, but they become a problem when they start to become a substitute for the work of being present for each other.
He writes, “Presence is a moral inheritance and a civic one. The habits we keep at the table become the society we live in. If we want a better one, we have to show up to the lives we already have.”
The good old days are right now — if we can see them
Naomi Schaefer Riley talked with the founder of an initiative that helps people overcome addiction by focusing on physical activities, not their trauma.
“You don’t need to introduce yourself as an addict every time you come to one of the fitness meetings. And you don’t need to spend time talking about it, though you can. More often the conversation is about how to hold a yoga pose successfully or whether you have the right form when you try to lift those heavy weights.”
How a focus on physical fitness is helping people overcome addiction
As the hantavirus that emerged on a cruise ship continues to make headlines, experts put the chance of another life-altering pandemic in our lifetimes at about 38%, Jay Evensen writes.
“Years ago, I used to wonder at how the 1918-19 influenza pandemic became known as ‘America’s forgotten pandemic.’ How could a nation forget about a life-changing illness that killed an estimated 675,000 Americans and disrupted families and communities? ... But I’m wondering if we’re much different from people a century ago. Pandemics are messy, especially in a free society.”
An infected cruise ship likely won’t expose our vulnerability to a new pandemic
End Notes
There’s lots of talk this week about whether the U.S. should suspend or lower the gas tax temporarily, as other countries have done in recent weeks.
Glenn Beck is in favor, but noted that for maximum impact, states should suspend their gas taxes, too.
There’s support for the measure on both sides of the aisle, although critics of the proposal say it provides modest relief for consumers while creating problems for governments. Some analysts say the federal gas tax, which was a penny when implemented in 1932 — and which was supposed to be temporary — should be repealed for good.
Having just paid more than $50 to fill my tank for the first time, modest relief is sounding better than none. I’m even eying my gas-powered lawnmower and suddenly thinking “No Mow May” is a great idea.
And finally, I was just about to haul myself to the theater to see the family-friendly blockbuster “Project Hail Mary,” but found it was released to streaming this week, so I’m still with the nos.
But they may yet draw me in for the rerelease of “Top Gun” and “Top Gun: Maverick,” which are returning to theaters this week for one week only.