Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ripped his successor Sean Duffy on Sunday after he claimed that the left was upset over the launch of his new road trip reality show because they didn’t want people to “celebrate America.”
“I love road trips. I love America. I actually took a taxpayer-funded road trip lasting about seven months. It was in Afghanistan,” said Buttigieg in an interview with CNN. “This is something very different.”
Duffy has faced backlash since teasing a five-part YouTube series called “The Great American Road Trip” that is set to capture his seven-month-long journey across the country with his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children.
Buttigieg, who served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, recently called out the Duffys over the “unserious” move before accusing the couple — both of whom have worked for Fox — of throwing “endless fits on national television when Pete was working from our son’s ICU bedside” (a focal point of right-wing outrage back in 2021).
Duffy — whose show is sponsored by companies overseen and regulated by his department — has gone on to claim that taxpayers didn’t take on any of the production costs and neither he nor his family have received a “salary or production royalties” off of it.
Pete Buttigieg told Bash on Sunday that the ex-MTV star’s return to the reality circuit is “not about patriotism.”
“It is an embarrassment to have him going around saying that a road trip ‘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,” Buttigieg said.
He continued, “To make road trips unaffordable and then go around celebrating your own road trip is exactly what people are so frustrated about.”
He went on to argue that Duffy’s scandal is “such an embarrassment” to the administration as it’s taking place while Trump signals that he doesn’t care about Americans’ financial situations.
Buttigieg called efforts to pay for the project through corporate sponsors as “nakedly unfair” and wrong, adding that it’s another example of Trump’s “pay-to-play Washington.”
He also pointed to the Federal Aviation Administration recently slashing its hiring target for air traffic controllers despite concerns over staffing shortages.
“Clearly the priorities are out of whack and the priority should be making sure that Americans have safe and affordable transportation.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Chasten Buttigieg’s name.