The left can’t stand a happy American family hitting the open road.
Pete Buttigieg and his husband came out swinging against Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy this week — and it did not go the way they planned.
And now the Duffys are firing back, and what Rachel Campos-Duffy said to Pete Buttigieg is something he won’t soon forget.
What Started the Fight
Secretary Duffy appeared on Fox &Friends on Friday to announce a five-part series called The Great American Road Trip, filmed over the past seven months with his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and some of their nine children.
The motto behind the whole thing is simple: “To love America is to see America.” Duffy said the project came together in short windows — weekends, school breaks, one- and two-day stops — squeezed around his duties running the Department of Transportation.
“Over the course of seven months, we just kind of found these moments where I might be able to do some work, I could take the kids with me, do a road trip,” Duffy told Fox & Friends.
The series is set to drop on YouTube ahead of America’s 250th birthday this July. And the Oval Office was the family’s very first stop. Duffy said President Donald Trump “was so generous with his time” when the kids came through.
Rachel Campos-Duffy said the family had turned down reality TV offers for years. “We’ve had dozens of reality TV people come to us and say, ‘We want to do a show with your family.’ We’ve always said no,” she told viewers. But when President Trump asked Cabinet members to do something to celebrate America’s anniversary, Sean Duffy had his answer ready.
The Left Pounces — and Gets the Facts Wrong
Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, Pete Buttigieg’s husband, went after the Duffys on X almost immediately, calling it a “multi-month, taxpayer-funded family road trip” and adding, “How much more unfocused, unserious, and out of touch can you be?”
He also dug up old grievances, writing, “The same Duffys who threw endless fits on national television when Pete was working from our son’s ICU bedside are now bragging about their multi-month, taxpayer-funded family road trip while gas and grocery prices soar for American families because of Trump’s war of choice.”
Pete Buttigieg piled on separately, posting on X: “I love a good road trip, but this is brutally out of touch: a Trump Cabinet member making a documentary about himself while regular families can’t afford road trips anymore, because Trump and his war put gas prices through the roof.”
There’s just one problem with all of that. The taxpayer-funded claim was flat wrong.
Rachel Campos-Duffy Shuts It Down
Rachel Campos-Duffy didn’t mince words. “Stand down, Chas,” she wrote in response to Chasten Buttigieg’s post.
She set the record straight fast. “All production costs were paid for by the non-profit, The Great American Road Trip, Inc. No one in my family — including my husband — were paid to do this,” she wrote. “We did it for FREE to celebrate America 250 & encourage other Americans to get off couches & screens and spend time together seeing our country. It was filmed in small one and two day stops over the course of seven months.”
And then she went for the jugular: “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.”
Secretary Duffy followed up Saturday with his own statement, confirming that career ethics and budget officials at the Department of Transportation fully reviewed and cleared his participation in accordance with federal rules, with zero taxpayer dollars spent on his family.
Chasten Moves the Goalposts
Once the taxpayer argument fell apart, Chasten Buttigieg pivoted. He started reposting critics on X who took aim at the show’s corporate sponsors — Boeing, Toyota, Shell, and United Airlines among them — companies that fall under DOT oversight.
The reposted attacks alleged a conflict of interest, claiming those companies effectively funded an extended vacation for the secretary. Some posts went further, tying the sponsorships to claims that Duffy has eased airline safety enforcement and hasn’t fined a single airline in over a year.
Duffy’s team pushed back on those characterizations too. But the shifting attacks tell you something about how confident the Left actually was in its original argument.
Sean Duffy Knows Exactly Who He’s Dealing With
Secretary Duffy waited until Saturday to deliver the line that probably stung the most. He said the “radical, miserable left” hates the series because it is “too wholesome,” “too patriotic” and “too joyful.”
Hard to argue with that read. The Left spent a full news cycle attacking a family road trip celebrating America’s birthday — a trip that cost taxpayers nothing, was cleared by ethics officials, and was filmed on weekends and school breaks.
And Pete Buttigieg, the man who spent four years running the DOT while air traffic control staffing cratered and infrastructure projects stalled, decided this was the moment to lecture someone else about being out of touch.
Buttigieg’s record at the DOT is not exactly a hall of fame resume. Duffy has been aggressive about fixing the air traffic control system, cracking down on illegal alien truckers, and pushing the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” as a down payment on rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. Buttigieg’s biggest moments in office mostly involved being missing in action.
Buttigeig also faced heavy criticism for going AWOL in the middle of a supply chain crisis to go on paternity leave after he and Chasten hired a surrogate to give birth to their children.
But the Duffys aren’t backing down. The series is still coming. The family is still encouraging Americans to get out and see their country. And the Left is still fuming that a Cabinet secretary with nine kids, a loving marriage, and a genuine love of America has the audacity to show it on camera.
Some people just can’t stand it when others are happy.
Sources: Fox News, The Hill, CNN, Mediaite, The Daily Beast