It would be fair to say that the Trump administration’s celebration of the United States’s 250th birthday has been unorthodox – involving, as it has, an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House, a poorly attended state fair, and a car race through Washington, before which the US president will take a lap of honor.On Tuesday, however, Donald Trump officials dropped perhaps their weirdest 250th offering yet: a six-part travel show in which the US secretary of transportation take his entire family on a startlingly self-involved, creatively funded road trip around the country.Billed as a way to “celebrate and share America’s story” and “understand the vast, beautiful, complicated place we call home”, The Great American Road Trip – which sits on the Department of Transportation’s YouTube page – does neither, instead serving as an apparent government-commissioned audition for Sean Duffy (a former star of MTV’s The Real World: Boston) to return to reality TV, this time alongside his family.It’s clear almost immediately that this is a show about Duffy, his wife – the Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy – and their admittedly very pleasant children, rather than American tourist spots. We theoretically visit and learn about the Liberty Bell, the Grand Canyon and Wyoming, but we learn much more about Sean and Rachel, as they introduce their nine children, tell the story of how they met and, in one particularly gratuitous scene, renew their marriage vows.It’s a strange show, stretched over almost three hours, which repeatedly raises the question: who is this for? The target audience must surely fit into an unusual venn diagram of people who like America and really, really like the Duffy family.The start of The Great American Road Trip sees the Duffy brood gather in Washington, where they visit the Oval Office and are waved off by Trump, appearing here in a brief cameo.“Taking a little trip?” the president asks the family. One of them tells him yes. “A little trip all over,” the president replies, demonstrating a strong understanding of what a road trip involves.“Valentina, does the president have pretty hair?” one of the Duffy’s daughters subsequently asks her younger sister. “Yeah,” the younger one says.With Trump out of the way, we’re into the meat of this thing, which is a mix between a glossily produced travelogue and pitch for Meet the Duffys, a reality show coming to a niche streaming service near you – with a heavy lean towards the latter.While the first episode is apparently focused on Philadelphia, most information about the city is swapped out for what is basically half an hour of getting to know the Duffys. It’s a constant trade-off: for every titbit about whatever tourist attraction the Duffys visit, we have to listen to more information about their family.So it is that we learn that the Liberty Bell cracked on its “test ring”, and that the Duffys’ son isn’t enjoying college.We discover that signatories to the Declaration of Independence risked being executed, and that one of the Duffys’ daughters is “a bit of a free spirit”. (The producers illustrate this by showing photographs of the daughter sticking her tongue out at the camera.)We get to look at a chair where George Washington presided over debates about the constitution, and learn that – wouldn’t you know it? – Sean and Rachel are former reality TV show participants, having met on Road Rules: All Stars, which aired in 1998.This is all interspersed with shots of the Duffys praying before meals and before bed, footage which serves no purpose other than to show any watching TV executives that the Duffys can appeal to a religious crowd.The Great American Road Trip was supposed to have aired in June, but has been held up amid questions about the ethics of the project. The government insists no taxpayer money was spent to create the show, but the fact it is sponsored by companies including Boeing and Toyota – who are regulated by the Department of Transport – prompted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) to file a complaint with the department’s office of inspector general in May.There have been further questions about the Duffys taking a road trip at a time when gas prices are sky high: Pete Buttigieg, the Democratic former transportation secretary, described the project as “brutally out of touch”.In the show, at least, the Duffys aren’t bothered about any of that, with their focus instead drawn to inserting themselves into famous American landscapes. Take episode three – Wyoming and Montana: Winter in the Wild – where Sean Duffy crowbars his family into a rather on-the-nose observation about the herding patterns of wild animals.“These buffalo congregate together. They are more powerful as a group,” Duffy tells his daughters, as he points at some wildlife. “There’s a message here. The buffalo and the Duffy family are more powerful together.”A tour guide called Roy, who has been standing to the side of the shot, coughs awkwardly and tells Duffy that, actually, these aren’t buffalo at all: they are bison. “See, y’all learned something,” an unfazed Duffy tells his family.In the first quarter of the final episode – titled Arizona: Family, Memories and the Road Ahead – we learn precisely nothing about Arizona. But we do find out that it’s the Duffys’ 27th wedding anniversary.That prompts some unsolicited, and surely unhelpful, relationship advice from Campos-Duffy. “The key to a good, long lasting [music] marriage is to marry somebody very good-looking that you’re attracted to, because marriage involves a lot of forgiveness, and it’s easier to forgive someone when you’re very attracted to them,” she says, before her husband takes the kids to a hub for Waymo, the self-driving taxi company.Is a visit to Waymo really going to excite teenage children? Is it something that the viewer will find interesting? Is it an essential part of a cross country road trip? No, no and no, but Waymo is one of the sponsors of the road trip, so off we go.“This is the future of transportation,” Duffy tells the kids, as they pull up to the facility. He makes no mention of Waymo’s recent travails, which include one of its vehicles blocking an ambulance from reaching a mass shooting in Austin in March (the Waymo was picking up a passenger), and dozens of its cars having to be manually retrieved last year after a blackout in San Francisco.By this point we’re nine minutes into the episode, and we’ve seen precious little of Arizona. We’re unlikely to any time soon because next, the Duffys take us to the chapel where they got married.By this point, it’s clear the show is a lesson in self-obsession, but what follows is still astonishing. The Duffys announce they’re going to renew their wedding vows.It’s here that the Great American Road Trip really jumps the shark. The stated purpose of this series was to “highlight everything from civics lessons about America’s founding to iconic national parks and thriving small-town communities”. The blurb on the road trip’s snazzy website promises a “guide to the historic landmarks, open roads, and small towns that tell 250 years of this country’s story”.Instead, we’re watching two people we don’t know renew their wedding vows in a six-part video series commissioned by the US government.“I love this experience, because on this American birthday, we saw the country, and we did it together – which, as a dad, makes me proud,” Duffy tells the camera at the end.At least someone enjoyed it. But for those less smitten with the secretary of transportation and his family, it’s hard to understand how this celebrates 250 years of the US – or anything, really, other than the Duffys themselves.