Duffy loves nothing more than to appear on various Rupert Murdoch-owned television channels and admit with his whole heart how he is far too timid to ever set foot on the country’s largest subway system. “It’s dangerous,” he has said, of the system which moves about four million people around the city every day and where shootings happen once every 190 million rides. “You have criminals,” he shivered on another occasion. “It’s homeless shelters. It’s insane asylums.” It’s… what? It’s also “dirty and violent and crime-ridden,” he added in yet another appearance, about the place where crime rates fell faster than it did in the rest of the city in recent years.
This little fieldmouse of a Cabinet Secretary will now bring his quaking terror to NASA, after Trump abruptly pulled the nomination of Jared Isaacman last month. That means he adds the space agency’s 18,000 or so employees (for now) to the 56,000 or so DOT staff he already oversees, most of whom presumably would not wet their pants in terror at the prospect of stepping foot on a subway car. It probably gives NASA a bit more of a direct line to the White House than Isaacman would have had, given Trump’s apparent fondness for Duffy and his frequent panic-stricken television appearances. That likely isn’t a good thing, given administration-wide attempts to slash budgets and staff everywhere, including at some of the most publicly popular agencies and initiatives around — which NASA very much is.
“Sean is doing a TREMENDOUS job in handling our Country’s Transportation Affairs,” Trump mis-capitalized in announcing the new appointment. The president probably feels an affinity for Duffy also thanks to his reality-television origin story, which began on The Real World: Boston in 1997 and where one can only assume he refused entirely to ride the T.
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