Republicans are generally disdainful of mass transit, in no small part because they are climate deniers and mass transit is associated with reducing pollution, a thing they do not care about at all. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is unusually fixated on the perils of mass transit, even for a Trump Cabinet member. Duffy doesn’t just hate public transportation, he seems to be terrified by the mere prospect of a big-city subway.
On Wednesday, Duffy went on Fox News to talk about the nefarious leftist plot to make you take transit: "If you're liberal, they want you to take public transportation. ... The problem is that it's dirty. You have criminals. It's homeless shelters. It's insane asylums. It's a work ground for the criminal element of the city to prey upon the good people."
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Duffy: "If you're liberal, they want you to take public transportation ... the problem is that it's dirty. You have criminals. It's homeless shelters. It's insane asylums. It's a work ground for the criminal element of the city to prey upon the good people."
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 28, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Duffy was doing the Fox media hit after a federal judge, Trump appointee Lewis Liman, dropped a 109-page opinion temporarily blocking the administration from ending congestion pricing in New York City. Liman ruled that the Metropolitan Transit Authority would be irreparably harmed if the Department of Transportation were allowed to kill congestion pricing while litigation proceeded.
Liman concluded that congestion pricing resulted in “not only superior environmental outcomes, but also increased productivity, improvements to health and safety, more instruction time for schoolchildren, and beneficial economic outcomes.”
The government’s fate might have been sealed in this case when DOJ attorneys accidentally filed an internal confidential memo with the court that explained how Duffy’s arguments were arbitrary and capricious, violated due process, and were unlikely to succeed, which is pretty much precisely what Judge Liman ruled.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul
Since Duffy was informed by the judge that his arguments against congestion pricing were bunk, he had to pivot to a different strategy, which is telling Fox News viewers how scary the New York subway is. This is familiar territory for Duffy, as he can always count on Fox to have him on to whine about how New York Gov. Kathy Hochul likes “homeless and mentally ill” people better than regular New Yorkers who just want to ride the subway.
The problem for Duffy is that the New York subway is not the paradise for criminals he makes it out to be. Crime in New York City is down sharply overall, and crime in the subway system is at its second-lowest level in 27 years. Ridership is up, in part because congestion pricing encourages more people to use mass transit.
Even without that bump, though, the New York subway system averages over 3 million riders every day. Normal people just aren’t that frightened of a train, dude.
Though Duffy is particularly fixated on New York because of his war on congestion pricing, he’s also pretty certain that Washington, D.C.’s metro is also a crime-ridden hellhole. Duffy’s letter to D.C.’s transit authority was relatively reasonable, at least by this administration’s standards, asking it to provide crime reduction plans and detailing all funds used to improve security for passengers and workers.
Had Duffy bothered to look, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority issues huge reports every year. They detailing its capital investments into security and safety for passengers and, for every proposed capital improvement, expected outcomes, deliverables, and funding sources. A two-second Google session will also turn up WMATA’s annual update on safety initiatives. All of WMATA’s crime statistics, including daily police blotters, are on its website.
Maybe the website is too scary for Duffy to look at. That might sound far-fetched until you learn that Duffy is also very worried about murals in D.C.’s transit system. Yes, murals.
Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser
Duffy sent a letter to D.C.’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, complaining that murals distract people and impact the effectiveness of traffic control devices. He also felt the murals “were installed intentionally to draw attention to their message rather than to promote the safety and mobility of road users and efficient use of the roadway in accordance with statute and regulation.”
Duffy probably isn’t literally afraid of murals. What he’s afraid of is diversity.
D.C. has a robust public art program and an annual mural project designed to honor D.C.’s diverse neighborhoods. Pretending that they compromise safety is just a way for the Trump administration to continue its siege of the nation’s capital.
When he’s not busy fretting about public art that President Donald Trump doesn’t like, Duffy is protecting the nation from scary wokeness by killing transit research and writing unhinged screeds about how he got rid of “deranged, leftist DEI mandates” about climate change, sustainability, environmental justice, and diversity. Sean, are the deranged DEI mandates in the room with you right now?
Some public transit is so threatening that it can’t even be allowed to exist. So Duffy yanked $64 million in federal grant money for a Texas high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston. According to Duffy, the project was “a waste of taxpayer funds and a distraction from Amtrak’s core mission of improving its existing subpar services.”
Elon Musk
An assertion of such tender care for Amtrak might land better if Trump and co-President Elon Musk were not both on record musing about privatizing it. Or perhaps if the administration weren’t creating such uncertainty about its future funding that Amtrak is cutting 450 jobs. Could be that Duffy is just very frightened by trains when they go fast, could be the usual Republican mania about giving tax dollars to private companies. Who can say?
Speaking of a mania for giving tax dollars to private companies, how will Musk profit from Duffy’s weird feels about mass transit? Well, by getting Duffy to “investigate” a high-speed rail project in California that Musk wants killed. While many conservatives hate high-speed rail for amorphous, ill-defined reasons, Musk hates high-speed rail for a very clear reason: it interferes with his business model of selling cars.
Recall that Musk essentially started an entire business, the stupidly monikered Boring Company, to thwart an earlier high-speed rail push in California. Musk did so by proposing the Hyperloop, where cars would travel underground at breakneck speeds, over three times faster than the proposed bullet train. Musk openly admitted he pushed the Hyperloop project as a way to get California to cancel the high-speed rail project.
The Hyperloop was an abject failure, like so many of Musk’s projects. Musk once absurdly promised he had “verbal government approval”—which is not really how governments do things—to build an underground loop that would get people from New York City to Washington, D.C. in 20 minutes.
In reality, the only Hyperloop project to come to fruition is a 2-mile stretch in Las Vegas where people can choose to be driven around underground in a Tesla. You can’t do it unless you’re a conference attendee. You can’t drive your own car or the Tesla. You will travel at nowhere near the promised speeds of 700 mph, instead humming along at a breakneck 40 mph.
Luckily for Musk, his vision of a world filled with passenger cars and devoid of mass transit is something Duffy can get behind. And despite Duffy talking tough at his confirmation hearing about how he would withstand any pressure to extend favorable treatment to Musk, it looks a lot like Musk is getting favorable treatment. And that’s even without Duffy doing car commercials for Tesla on the taxpayers’ dime.
Related |Sean Duffy is busy shilling for Tesla as flights are grounded
In April, Duffy announced a rule change that will not only make the roads less safe but also ensure that Tesla, and only Tesla, benefits. Certain types of nonfatal crashes now no longer need to be reported to the DOT, but this exception only applies to partial self-driving vehicles using Level 2 systems. You get exactly one guess as to which automaker is the only one that has Level 2 partial self-driving vehicles.
You also only get one guess as to who has been agitating for this rule change since before Trump took office. Even other autonomous vehicles, like Waymo, do not fall under this exception. So, literally every other manufacturer working on autonomous vehicles has to report crash data, but Musk doesn’t.
Musk doesn’t want to have to report this data because Tesla accounts for most of the nonfatal crashes that had to be reported previously. Tesla also accounts for most of the fatal crashes reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with a Reuters analysis finding that from Jan. 1, 2024, to Oct. 15, 2024, Tesla was involved in 40 of the 45 fatal crashes reported during that period.
Duffy’s profound disdain for mass transit is a perfect match for Musk’s desire to sell as many cars as possible. Duffy’s mania for deregulation is also aligned with Musk’s desire to eliminate oversight, though Duffy might not go so far as Musk’s call for literally all government regulations to be eliminated.
But both of them believe in a world where corporations shouldn’t have to be bothered with safety rules, making things far more dangerous for the rest of us. Both of them also believe in a world where mass transit is a scary, dangerous, decrepit thing, and the only solution is not more money for mass transit—that would be silly. The solution is more cars, and if those cars just happen to be Teslas, all the better.
Perhaps Duffy can shoot another commercial from the Tesla factory floor, just to make clear that there’s only one car company that has the full attention of the administration. In any other era, this would be a massive conflict of interest and a huge scandal. But in the Trump/Musk era, it’s barely a blip.
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