Duffy anti-porn road show remains missing
It has been roughly seven months since Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his wife, former reality TV cast member Rachel Campos-Duffy, loaded their nine children into a vehicle and filmed a cross-country series called “The Great American Road Trip.” The show was supposed to premiere on YouTube in June. It is now July, and the series has not appeared.
The project drew attention in part because Campos-Duffy, while promoting the show, mentioned PornHub in a way that left many confused. “We live in a Pornhub world,” she said at the time. The comment never quite made sense in context, and it still doesn’t. But the bigger question now is whether the show itself will ever see an audience.
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Corporate sponsors including Boeing, Shell, Toyota, Royal Caribbean, United Airlines, and Lyft contributed funding. The show was produced through a nonprofit called Great American Road Trip Inc., incorporated in Delaware. Neither the White House nor the Department of Transportation has answered questions about its status.
No one seems to know what happened to the show.
Reporters at an outlet ran a piece on July 1 that asked what happened to Sean Duffy’s road trip series. The outlet, despite its Washington connections, could not get a straight answer. It has not been officially canceled, but no one will confirm an air date.
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Tori Barnes, who runs the nonprofit that paid for production, told the outlet the show would be released “in the coming weeks.” She said the series would inspire Americans “to take a road trip of their own as we celebrate America’s 250th birthday all year long.” That statement came in late June.
Transportation Department spokesperson Nate Sizemore added that the department is “putting the finishing touches on the production” and looks forward to sharing it “soon.” He did not provide a date. The department has not made Duffy available for an interview.
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For a project that was promoted as a done deal, the silence is notable. The administration has a pattern of promising things will happen in “a couple of weeks” and then letting them slip away entirely. That does not mean it is dead — “Community” got a sixth season on Yahoo after NBC canceled it — but it does mean the rollout is not going as planned.
Maybe it will still air. Maybe it won’t. For now, the road trip remains invisible.
