Crying before my ProTalks session was not my plan, at all. My plan was to hype myself into a particular emotional cocktail of righteous anger and excitement, precise and dangerous and ready. But it didn’t work. I’m not sure why I thought it would work. I tried. Instead, I found myself, in tears, pacing the floor of room B104 at the Mid-America Trucking Show, not running through any of my presentation. I thought about all the hours, the sleepless nights, and the weekends, wading through FMCSA records and corporate filings and court documents and social media, trying to build an argument (or several arguments) that a lot of people had told me, in a lot of different ways, was not worth building.

I reflected on the incredible people I’ve had the chance to meet through all of this. I thought about those who have supported me and everyone else advocating for the integrity of this industry. I couldn’t stop the emotional weight of it all, and the tears came with it. But my goodness, you guys, look at what we’ve done.

The energy at MATS this year was different in a way that is difficult to articulate to anyone who was not there to experience it, but I will try.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to recognize the particular kind of exhaustion that had settled into it. It’s not an exhaustion that comes from hard work, which this industry has never lacked, but the exhaustion from feeling invisible, from watching bad actors and criminals hollow out something your family built their lives around while the institutions that were supposed to protect it didn’t care, or moved too slowly, or moved in the oppposite direction, or had no political will to act on what was right in front of them.

For years, the people who cared the most about the integrity of this industry carried this weight largely alone, but this year, at MATS, it felt different. It felt like people finally exhaled after holding their breath for a very, very long time. It felt like those who had been told for years that they did not matter were all standing in the same room, listening to the same message. Together, they heard that they do matter. They heard Secretary Sean Duffy and Chief Derek Barrs say they are listening to them, and they are actively making changes to help fix and save the American trucking industry.

So, they do listen to us.

I had the opportunity to interview our Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, and FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs. For those on X, FreightX. We finally know that it did, in fact, work. The posts, the tags, they see it. Our voices are, finally, being heard!

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Driving home from Louisville, the excitement I felt was genuine. It wasn’t the falsely manufactured excitement of a ‘good’ conference. It wasn’t the temporary high of being around everyone. It was a deep knowing that we are finally making progress. The people who love this industry and have refused to abandon it are finally starting to believe in themselves again.

No, we are not finished. Yes, we have a lot of work to do. I refuse to be the generation that gives up on the American trucking industry.

MATS Coverage you should watch.

Yes, you should go to MATS next year.

Danielle Chaffin, Highway Veritas

The Mid-America Trucking Show 2026