Peter Buttigieg Thinks The Trump Fever Will Break

Photo illustration by Devin Oktar Yalkin

 

By Lulu Garcia-Navarro

The New York Times

This past month has been one of the most consequential and dizzying periods in modern American politics. It began with President Biden’s disastrous debate in late June. Then came an assassination attempt against former President Trump. A week later, President Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. And now Harris is already the de facto Democratic nominee.

At warp speed, the dynamics of this entire election have changed — not just for voters but for party leaders like Pete Buttigieg, who went from being a top Biden campaign surrogate to a top Harris campaign surrogate in hours. Buttigieg is one of the most popular figures in the Democratic Party. Nicknamed Mayor Pete, he went from mostly unknown to a national star when he ran for president in 2020 as the mayor of South Bend, Ind. He then joined the Biden administration as secretary of transportation, and he’s also frequently on TV as one of the Democrats’ top messengers. There are reports that he’s under consideration to become Harris’s running mate. If that happens and they win, he will be the first openly gay vice president.

Listen to the Conversation With Pete Buttigieg

The Democrat talks about the election vibe shift and what a Kamala Harris win would mean for both parties.

On Thursday, I sat down with Buttigieg to talk about how Biden’s decision to drop out changed the race, what took so long, and what’s next. And if you notice that I’m not calling him “Secretary Buttigieg,” or asking anything about his work in the cabinet, that’s because there is a law, the Hatch Act, that prevents him from mixing his day job with campaigning. 

There’s been this sudden vibe shift, if you will, in the Democratic Party since Biden dropped out. To what do you ascribe that level of enthusiasm? Part of what President Biden did with his extraordinary, historic, selfless choice was he tore down some obstacles that stood between voters and the media and commentators and all of us — focusing on the issues and the values that I think can propel Democrats to victory. That’s something that is coming through with a new clarity right now. And as you described, the vibe shift is really extraordinary. There’s been a level of joy to the campaign that I think is welcome.

Tear down obstacles — I mean, the obstacle many would say was President Biden himself. A new New York Times/Siena poll shows that over 80 percent of voters are happy that Biden dropped out. Clearly voters were hungering for something different. Why did the party ignore that desire for change for so long? I think this is something the party was wrestling with for a long time. And then the president wrestled with it personally. And then he did something that is world-historically rare, for not just the leader of a country, but the most powerful person in the world to lay power aside.

CNN reported that there haven’t been any full cabinet meetings since late last year, so I don’t know how often you were meeting with President Biden himself, but as a surrogate, did you not have any questions or doubts about his abilities? The last time I was working with President Biden really closely was during a disaster a few months ago. I’m reminding myself I’m not supposed to appear in my official capacity, so I won’t delve into that. But look, nobody’s denying that he’s 10 years older than he was 10 years ago. The point is that he’s really good at being president and in my view still is.

You have framed this as, he sacrificed for his country, that this was a noble act. But the reality was that he was facing sliding polling numbers and defection of donors and members of his party. He could have made that choice weeks ago, giving Vice President Harris or any eventual nominee a much longer runway and time to defeat Donald Trump. And he didn’t do it. Did he wait too long? One of the things you sign up for when you go into politics, and certainly when you’re in high office, is everybody else telling you what you should have done. And we can all say he should have done this, or he should have done the same thing but at a different time or should have done it in a different way. But the fact stands that he did an extraordinary thing.

You know, we in the media were raising legitimate questions about Biden’s age and his ability to run, and yet reporters were being excoriated by the campaign for asking those questions, and by Biden in public. How do those attacks on the press sit with you, now knowing what we know? Well, look, I’ve never participated in an attack on the press. I think that it is natural to feel strong, passionate, defensive even, about the person you believe in when you feel like they’re being attacked, especially when you feel like they’re being attacked unfairly. 

But it wasn’t unfair. Well, certain dimensions I think were unfair. For example, the fact that in a given day, you might have almost identical flubbing of names by the two major candidates, but only one of them would have that plastered in certain people’s commentary. And look, again, it’s the nature of being passionate about the person you believe in to come to their defense.

ImagePete Buttigieg on a stage at a rally.

 There was a lot of discussion in the weeks after Biden’s disappointing debate about what another nomination process could look like. And in the end, it just doesn’t seem as if there’s been any appetite for a more competitive process among Democrats. Why do you think that is? I think a lot of people looked at her, looked at what she brought, looked at the importance of quickly bringing the party together and reached that conclusion that backing her was the best way to do that. And I know a little bit about this. I remember making the toughest decision of my personal political career, which was the decision to end my presidential campaign. And realizing that even though I wasn’t a candidate anymore, what I did mattered. And I had a responsibility to try to do what I could to lead to a good outcome. And that led me to decide very quickly to back President Biden’s campaign. And this felt like a similar moment where, whether it was by dint of being in office or just being somebody with a platform, there were a lot of people who had a lot of influence and therefore a lot of responsibility, and just about everybody decided the best way to use that influence and responsibility was to help bring the party together quickly.

I mean, it’s good politics. Do you think people actually came to these conclusions individually, or was there a sense from the party leadership that everyone needed to fall in line? Democrats are not exactly famous for falling in line. When we do something like coalesce that quickly, I think it’s because there’s a real sense up and down and throughout the party that it’s the right thing to do.

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Switching up the ticket has offered Democrats this chance to reset, not just on the person but on the message and the policies. President Biden has taken a lot of heat for his handling of the war in Gaza, inflation, the border. Would you like to see the Harris campaign differentiating itself on those particular issues? Well, I’ll leave it to her to indicate where there will be continuity and where she might have a different approach or maybe just a different emphasis. 

But what would you like to see? Well, I’d like to see her reach those concerns that Americans have. So on something like inflation, for example, I think she’s well positioned not just to explain how she’s contributed to the work that brought inflation back down to 3 percent in this country, but also the difference between her economic proposals and the clearly inflationary proposals of Donald Trump.

What you’re saying — nothing has fundamentally changed about the Democratic message here, which is that things are getting better, that inflation has gone down under President Biden. That’s been something that the Democratic Party has been trying to run on and push over and over and over again. And yet poll after poll shows that more people trust former President Trump on these issues than President Biden. Are you suggesting that now, because it’s a new candidate, Kamala Harris can reset and people will just forget that she was part of the administration? What I’m saying is that part of what a candidate does, part of what a messenger does, is to convince people of things. And I think she’s a very convincing leader.

The right is trying to portray Harris as this far-left extension of the failures of the Biden administration. And they’re also using a lot of sexist and racist attacks. They’re calling her a D.E.I. hire. And worse stuff that I don’t want to repeat. And I just wonder, as a surrogate, how do you combat that? Well, I do think that those attacks have been a bad look for Republicans. And you can tell because, when you’ve got somebody like Mike Johnson, who is a very, very conservative figure, the speaker of the House, telling his own caucus, hey, cool it, he’s basically saying that they are embarrassing the party, and I think acknowledging that they are diminishing the party’s chances by indulging in that kind of rhetoric. The fact that they can’t think of what else to do besides go right to race and gender isn’t just revealing about some of the ugliest undercurrents in today’s Republican Party. It’s also just profoundly unimaginative because it means that they can’t speak to how any of this is going to make people’s lives better. In other words, they can’t conceive of a politics that isn’t just about the personalities. And their inability to explain how your life as an American every day will be any different, certainly any better, is revealed in the fact that they immediately reach for one of two things, saying she’s too far left, which is what literally every Republican says about literally any Democrat who is running against the Republicans. If Joe Manchin were the nominee, they’d say the same thing about him. It’s just standard and therefore boring. Or these really ugly attacks, which may be meant to get attention, but they are very much telling on themselves when they go there.

You are clearly one of the party’s best communicators. You can deliver a message. You’ve been very on-message while we’ve been talking. [Laughs.] I am thinking about how you see your role right now, because while Biden rarely talked to the press, you not only engage with people like me, but you also go to Fox News. And I am wondering why you do that. Because I know that there are so many people who tune in in good faith. I don’t always feel that the corporation that runs Fox News is acting in good faith, but I know that the viewers might be tuning in in good faith and getting their information from this news source. So I, as a political figure, can hardly blame a voter for not being responsive to our message if they literally have never heard it. And we’re in a very fragmented environment. Honestly, we’re lucky if we can get to somebody through TV, versus just even more fragmented internet sources. And I know that if I’m on that network, I’m one of the relatively few voices with our message, and so if I didn’t go there to give that message, somebody might never hear it. I also know that you cannot assume who somebody is or how they’re going to vote just based on what network they watch. Of course, there are a lot of strong patterns, but there are a lot of people who can be moved. And sometimes the person who picked the channel is not the same as the other person who’s also in the house, listening to what’s being said. Sometimes when you explain what you believe to somebody, even if they don’t completely agree with you, they respect you more, and are inclined to maybe trust you and give you the benefit of the doubt. So that’s why I’m there.

Image

Pete Buttigieg talking outside of the White House.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on the North Lawn of the White House on July 24, a few days after President Biden ended his re-election campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris became the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. Buttigieg has been in the conversation as a potential running mate for Harris.Credit... Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Do you think the vice president should go on Fox? Do you think she should debate on Fox? I would be skeptical of the fairness of a debate hosted by Fox, but that’s a decision that I’m sure she and the campaign will think through. 

I want to ask you about a specific shift in messaging I’ve noticed this week from the Democrats. The Harris campaign is leaning into the idea that Trump is, quote, weird. It’s very different from the way Democrats framed him before, which is that he’s an existential threat to democracy, this terrifying figure that is going to take away people’s rights. “Weird” seems, you know, a different tack from that. What do you think of that strategy, of basically laughing at him? Well, to be clear, I think we’re doing both. We’re talking about the implications for democracy and noting that he is obviously a strange person who’s getting stranger, and you’ve got to ask yourself, is that the kind of person you want in charge of the country? Part of the promise of a Kamala Harris presidency is actually the prospect of a comparatively normal Republican Party. What I mean by that is that beating Donald Trump the first time in 2020 ended his term, but it did not end his grip on the G.O.P. Beating him twice would, I think, have a different effect on a lot of people in the G.O.P. who know better than to be on board with him. He goes against their values too, not just my values, but they’ve gone along with it because they think it’s the path to power. And it would become abundantly clear that that is not true if we beat him, not just the way we beat him in 2020, not just the way we indirectly beat him in 2022 in the midterms, but beat him a second or, so to speak, third time.

What I’m hearing you say, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is if Donald Trump is defeated in this election, then perhaps the Republican Party can be freed from his grip? I think so. I made myself watch the first couple Republican presidential debates, and we had a lot of Republican candidates this cycle. There were still some things that I thought were pretty fringe, and just about everything I heard I disagreed with, but apart from some of the darkness of Vivek’s populism, you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a more normal Republican Party. Look, we have fooled ourselves many times before into thinking that the fever would break. We thought it would happen before he was elected when the “Access Hollywood” tape revealed that he had boasted about sexual assault. We thought it would happen when he was defeated, but he wasn’t in 2016. We thought it might happen after Jan. 6, and it very, very nearly did. So many of the people who are now kissing up to him basically turned their back on him then. We got so close to the fever breaking, but it didn’t quite break, because Republicans found that their access to power still depended on their standing with Donald Trump. If he leads this party to defeat a third time, I believe that the self-interest, just the internal power dynamics of the G.O.P., the very power dynamics that have kept them enthralled to him, even though so many of them know better(notably including, by the way, JD Vance, who, back when he was speaking truthfully and for himself, referred to Donald Trump as an idiot and compared him to an opioid, which is an exceptionally dark thing to say about somebody if you are from or connected to Appalachia as JD Vance is, right? And that was in public. In private, comparing him to Hitler, and now turning around and supporting him) — all of that finally breaks loose if they realize that attaching yourself to Donald Trump doesn’t just destroy your character; it destroys your access to power.

You mentioned JD Vance. Even though your politics are very far apart, you do share a lot on paper. You’re both Midwesterners, you both served in the military, you ended up in elite places for school and then you spent time in the business world before becoming politicians. Does that give you any special perspective on him as a person? I’ve certainly encountered a lot of people like him. He and I both emerged at a time when a lot of people in the Midwest began to find that commentators and figures from the coasts were approaching our part of the country almost with exotic fascination. And at least in my case, I sought to engage that attention as a way to bring support to the city that I was leading as mayor that I was trying to inspire people to believe in. I think in a different way, he chased that same vibe. It seems to have led him to Silicon Valley. But then it led him to this place where he’s advancing a vision that is terrible for places like where I come from, and I would argue where he comes from. But the other thing I would say is: He has traded on fascination about Midwestern stories and Midwestern values, but the most important Midwestern value I know of is to be straightforward, to be true to yourself, to be true to your core. And because he spoke unequivocally about how sinister and unfit Donald Trump was just a few years ago, only to flip around, embrace him and be on his ticket so that he can have more power, people are wondering if he has any core at all.

Have you read “Hillbilly Elegy”? It’s one of those books that I own but haven’t read, just to be honest.

 JD Vance was never a hillbilly. He grew in an Upper-class neighborhood in Cincinnati

 Speaking of vice presidents, the next big decision for Harris is who her V.P. is going to be. In a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, I’m sure you know this, you are tied with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan as the most popular person for the V.P. pick. I know you’re not going to tell me if you want the job or not, but do you think you’d be a good vice president? I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to talk like that knowing that the person who needs to make that decision is the person who’s going to make it, and that’s her. Not me.

Would you like to be vice president? Again, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to wander down that path with you right now.

Whoever the V.P. is, identity is going to play a huge part in the race. Harris would be the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket. And many of the Black and brown women friends that I have have said to me, you know there’s no way she’ll be elected. There’s like a fatalism there, a cynicism about just how far we’ve actually come as a country. I completely get where that comes from. And yet, even in my short career and life, I have seen these impossibilities turn into realities. Things that were, again, not just unlikely, but would have been considered ridiculous, have become the norm again and again.

But if that’s true, then why does she have to choose a white guy as a V.P.? I mean, that’s who’s being vetted. Look, nobody knows more about the vice presidency than she does. She knows what she’s doing. She knows the job. She knows what she wants, and she knows the people out there she’s going to want to consider. But again, the other thing I would say, and certainly about her future presidency, which will be historic, is that before something like that happens, people always think it’s impossible. So many people thought that in 2008. Anybody who is going to be a first has to overcome that skepticism. 

I assume at this point, you know Kamala Harris very well. Do you have a specific story about working with her or something about her as a person that you think voters should know? I think people do know this, but she is not just impressive, she’s smart and funny. The best chances I had to see this were when I was very involved in debate prep. I was asked to effectively play Mike Pence, which is a very strange psychological thing for me to do, but I’m so glad I got to do it because I got to see her in action. So often you hear, Oh, this person’s really funny and loose, but it doesn’t come through on TV. But I actually think what’s interesting, not just TV, but the internet has picked up on the fact that she has this great sense of humor. And it’s also revealing that the G.O.P. has tried to attack her for it, and that’s fallen flat. I mean, even just this idea of sending around images of her laughing, as if her joy is something that looks bad. When actually what looks bad is to be the doom-and-death march Republican Party against a Democratic Party that on the one hand is very clear about the enormous stakes of this election, and on the other hand is visibly enjoying ourselves right now.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.