Coffee Break: Trump Admin Combines Reality Show Nonsense With Very Real Grifting

Trump’s Transportation Secretary distracts with an ill-timed reality show even as an AI company linked to the Trump family and the UAE launches a $4.8 billion IPO.

That is to say, the Trump 2.0 regime continues to blend the absurd and the utterly corrupt.

Plus there are some power struggles going on that have at least one key Trump 2.0 villain somewhat restrained for the moment.

Start With the Stupid

Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is relatively unknown compared to such luminaries as former head of DHS Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem and her kept key man “government consultant” Corey Lewandowski, but he’s doing what he can to rectify that with a new YouTube reality show.

It’s getting the full crisis treatment from the MSM:

pic.twitter.com/ZK4omrmHkk

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) May 11, 2026

NBC clucks their tongue:

“The Great American Road Trip,” a five-part reality series set to air on YouTube in celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary, follows Duffy as he travels across the country with his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children.
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The project marks a return to the couple’s reality-TV roots. Before entering politics, Duffy was a cast member on MTV’s “The Real World: Boston” in 1997, then joined the channel’s reality game show “Road Rules: All Stars,” on which he and Campos-Duffy first met.
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The show has drawn criticism from those who call it tone-deaf as average fuel prices have climbed to more than $4.50 per gallon, up roughly 50% since the U.S. entered war with Iran in late February.

Some commenters on YouTube were blunt. One compared the trip to “going on a foodie tour during the Great Depression.” Another wrote: “Americans are struggling to afford gas and groceries but these two reality tv and Fox News stars are treated to free trips with celebrity visits and a cruise. Read the room, Mark and Marie Antoinette.”
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Duffy said on social media that all of the show’s production costs were covered by a nonprofit group, The Great American Road Trip Inc. — not taxpayers — and that neither he nor his family received a salary or production royalties. Sizemore said that covered costs included gas, car rentals, lodging and activities and that taxpayer funds were used only for official government travel.

Critics also raised conflict-of-interest concerns: Several of the show’s sponsors — including Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Royal Caribbean Group and United Airlines — are companies that Duffy’s department oversees and regulates.

Naturally there’s a financial corruption angle to what Duffy is calling The Great American Road Trip.

Dekleptocracy chronicles the scams:

On May 12, 2026, Politico published the actual pitch deck (PDF) for The Great American Road Trip, a 501(c)(4) shell that bankrolled seven months of reality-television filming starring Duffy, his Fox News host wife Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine children, while he was a cabinet secretary. Four sponsorship tiers top out at the $1,000,000 Platinum level. This tier promised, in writing, “strategically placed speaking roles within program segments” and up to six VIP invitations to receptions and roundtables with a sitting Cabinet secretary. The producer was Bunim, the company behind Duffy’s 1997 stint on MTV’s The Real World.

Boeing. Toyota. Shell. Royal Caribbean. United Airlines. The Irish construction giant, CRH. Comcast/NBCUniversal. Chase Travel. Enterprise. Google. The donor list reads like the DoT regulatory schedule. Also: The US. Travel Association, whose former chief lobbyist now runs the nonprofit. Each is a regulated party that had active business before Duffy’s department during the filming window. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed an ethics complaint. The DoT Inspector General is reviewing. But the corruption eclipses ethical violations and raises tough questions for Americans.

For example, Boeing’s 737 MAX killed 346 people between Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302, and then, through sheer luck, avoided adding to the body count with a door-plug separation on Alaska 1282 in January 2024 – miraculously, the two seats next to the hole in the fuselage were empty that flight. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which Duffy oversees, blamed these deaths and injuries on manufacturing and oversight failure. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which Duffy also oversees, had capped MAX production at 38 aircraft per month to give Boeing time to fix what was broken.

But in October 2025, three months into filming the road trip, Duffy’s FAA raised that cap to 42. Then, just last month, the FAA administrator told Bloomberg the MAX 7 and MAX 10 were on track for certification in 2026. Boeing announced its road trip sponsorship in January 2025.

Did Duffy’s department clear Boeing’s aircraft because Boeing fixed the aircraft or because Boeing funded Duffy’s 7-month road trip? The evidence doesn’t give us an answer, but an important reason why we have independent regulatory bodies is that nobody has to ask that question.

The ridiculousness compounded when former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten got into it with Campos-Duffy online. I’ll refer readers seeking additional brain damage to the Daily Beast for more.

But there are much more serious capers afoot.

Trump and UAE Linked Cerebras Hoping for $4.8 Billion IPO

The Wall Street Journal has the basic outline of the IPO (archived):

Cerebras Systems said it will offer 30 million shares in its planned initial public offering at a price of $150 to $160 a share, up from its previous plan to offer 28 million shares at a price of $115 to $125 a share.

The IPO would raise $4.8 billion at the upper end of the pricing range.
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Cerebras, a chip startup that makes processors customized for running advanced artificial-intelligence models, will make its trading debut Thursday under the ticker CBRS.

The company’s chips are designed for inference workloads, the types of computations required to allow an AI model to respond to user queries, and have seen surging demand as AI labs transition from training to running their models.

Thornton McEnery of Moby has some analysis on the IPO and its market timing in a piece headlined “Cerebras Doubles Its Pre-IPO Valuation in Three Months… Cool“:

The IPO market is back, and Wall Street is treating every listing like a warm-up act for the one nobody will say out loud: SpaceX. Let’s be clear, the whole IPO parade is fluffing for Musk’s rocket company. But before that inevitable, earth-shaking (and WeWork-level problematic) debut, the market is at least revealing how hungry it actually is. Enter Cerebras Systems.

Turns out the market is pretty hungry.
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The AI chipmaker raised its IPO price range to $150-$160 a share on Monday, up from $115-$125 just last week. At the high end, Cerebras walks away with $4.8 billion in proceeds and a fully diluted valuation of $48.8 billion. The company was valued at $23 billion in February. Three months and one geopolitical crisis later, it’s worth more than twice that. Investors, apparently, are not feeling cautious.

To be fair, the pitch is simple: Cerebras makes chips that are faster than Nvidia’s GPUs and cheaper, which is the kind of sentence that makes AI infrastructure investors immediately reach for their checkbooks. OpenAI committed more than $20 billion to the company and relies on Cerebras for a code-writing model. AWS recently announced it would bring Cerebras chips into its data centers, which is the enterprise equivalent of a gold star.

Let’s connect the dots to Team Trump and the UAE with help from this Reuters report from last September:

Cerebras Systems, a Silicon Valley startup aiming to take on Nvidia, opens new tab by producing a dinner-plate-sized AI computing chip, on Tuesday said it raised $1.1 billion and added 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, as an investor.
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The deal added investors Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners and 1789 Capital, the fund where President Donald Trump’s son is a partner. Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman told Reuters in an interview that 1789’s involvement was led by Paul Abrahimzadeh, an investment banker and veteran of Citigroup, which Cerebras had previously tapped to lead an initial public offering.
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Cerebras last year filed for an initial public offering on Nasdaq. The offering was delayed by U.S. national security review of a $335 million investment by G42, an Abu Dhabi-based cloud computing and AI company.

Last Fall there was exciting talk about Cerebras and UAE partnering for a Gulf State Stargate, per Reuters:

AI chip startup Cerebras Systems aims to deploy its infrastructure to the United Arab Emirates to support the Gulf state’s rapidly growing AI sector, as well as markets in India and Pakistan, CEO Andrew Feldman told Reuters on Monday.

“I’m very confident that there will be big clusters here of our gear,” including “megawatts worth of equipment” for the Stargate project, Feldman, referring to the first phase of the world’s largest planned set of AI data centres outside the United States.

No word on how that’s fared during the Iran War which has seen the UAE take a bit of a beating, but the team isn’t a one locale pony.

TechCrunch has more on what G42 and Cerebras are up to together, in India of all places:

Abu Dhabi-based tech company G42 has partnered with U.S.-based chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing power via a new supercomputer system in India, the companies said on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

The system will be hosted in India and follow local data residency, security, and compliance rules. The project aims to provide computing resources for AI applications to educational institutions, government entities, and small and medium enterprises.
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Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) are also part of the project. Last year, MBZUAI and G42 released Nanda 87B, a Hindi-English large language model built on Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B model, which is purported to understand casual speech in Hindi and English.

Lest readers worry that the Trump family portfolio isn’t properly hedged for war time, fear not, the boys are into drones as well.

Trumps Buy In, Secure Air Force Investment

Bloomberg has the scoop:

The US Air Force agreed to buy an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from a company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons, according to the firm, deepening the military’s ties to defense contractors linked to the first family as the US war with Iran enters its third month.

The West Palm Beach-based company, Powerus, will sell the drones to the Pentagon following a demonstration at a facility in Arizona, according to Brett Velicovich, the company’s co-founder and president.

…the company’s ties to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump could invite scrutiny of the deal.

Rather than pursuing an initial public offering, Powerus is planning to merge with Aureus Greenway Holdings Inc., a golf-course operator backed by the Trumps that already has a Nasdaq listing, according to an announcement earlier this year.

Democrats in Congress have asked the Pentagon for more information about other defense contractors and technology firms with ties to the president’s family. In addition to Powerus, Eric Trump backed a reverse-merger deal between Israeli drone maker Xtend and JFB Construction Holdings, a publicly listed construction company.

In response to criticism of their business partnerships in their father’s second term, his sons have repeatedly said they are private businessmen.

Glad they cleared that up.

Let’s close out this round-up of Trump regime antics with a look at the rough patch hit by former POTUS favorite Stephen Miller.

Stephen Miller on the Outs

The Atlantic titled their piece “Stephen Miller in Retreat” (archived), which phrase functions for me as a psychological balm akin to “cancer in remission.”

Let’s take a look:

The White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser designed Trump’s second-term immigration agenda. But weeks into the new year, the president dismantled the roving Border Patrol strike forces that Miller had encouraged; turned on Noem, who had carried out Miller’s aggressive instructions; and handed control of the deportation program back to career law-enforcement officials.

White House insiders said that Miller remains a top adviser to the president, that he has a singular relationship to Trump built over the past decade, and that his job is not in jeopardy. Immigration enforcement remains a central theme of the administration and is expected to feature prominently in Trump’s midterm-election messaging. They said that Miller has always seen himself as a staffer who subordinates his own opinions on policy to the agenda of the president, even when it shifts. “The President loves Stephen,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told us in a statement. “And the White House staff respects him tremendously.”
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The setback for Miller is striking largely because his rise was so stunning. No White House official in recent history—since Vice President Dick Cheney in the early 2000s, perhaps—has had such a dramatic and direct impact on U.S. government policy and such operational sway over so many parts of government.

Miller oversaw the drafting and release of executive orders in the early days of Trump’s second term, sat at the table for early national-security decisions, and was the driving force behind legislation that awarded $175 billion in funding for immigration enforcement, allowing for more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, detention centers, and deportation flights.
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the second year of Trump’s second term is being directed by a new immigration-enforcement team. The new secretary of homeland security, former Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, took over in late March with a mandate to get back to basics. Leaders of the department who had been sidelined by Noem, such as Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, suddenly found themselves empowered. Employees she had pushed out, such as former Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar and the CBP official Matt Eagan, were welcomed back. Andrew Block, a close ally of Miller who served as CBP’s chief counsel, was shown the door…

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