Most insane administration ever... Sean Duffy will fix your neighborhood road if you breed a big flock of Rubes.
Sean Duffy's Holy War at the Transportation Department "Could we bring Jesus up from the basement?
"This is a good read.
Sean Duffy has spent most of his adult life as a professional attention-seeker. He is a former reality TV star, for one, and also a former Fox News host. Tough luck, then, that in the second Trump administration, Duffy got stuck as secretary of the most dreary of federal agencies—transportation. When was the last time that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration went viral?
But Duffy has found a way to turn even the most mundane highway procurement matters into an opportunity for pandering to the MAGA base—and getting back on Fox News. His secret sauce? He has been enthusiastically using the agency to spread the Gospel and advance his mission to make America fecund again. “In Trump 2.0,” laments Peter Montgomery, the research director at the nonprofit civil liberties group, People for the American Way, “every place is a place to wage holy war.”
Duffy was once the “resident playboy” on MTV’s “Real World,” where he danced naked, called a roommate a “bitch,” and talked about getting laid. Now, he’s a devout Catholic with nine children who never misses an opportunity to urge young men to get married and have big families. Legal experts say Duffy’s activities are a stark violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on mixing church and state, but his fervor seems to override his obligation to uphold the law.
Shortly after Duffy joined a Trump cabinet full of MAGA influencers, he made his first attempt to grab headlines and advance his religious mission by promising to prioritize transportation funding for areas with high birth and marriage rates. The policy was roundly panned as unworkable and failed to generate the sort of media coverage a camera-hungry secretary would like to see. Duffy was learning the hard way that, unlike other federal agencies—Health and Human Services, for instance, or Education—the Transportation Department is a tough spot from which to launch a culture war.
Snip... motherjones.com |