Former Transportation Secretary and 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has argued that Democrats suffered heavy losses in 2024 because they’re “too attached” to the “status quo.”
Speaking to NPR, he said Democrats shouldn’t try to restore everything being torn down by President Donald Trump.
“You’ve got an administration that is burning down so many of the most important institutions that we have in this country, which is wrong,” said Buttigieg. “It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was.”
The 43-year-old argued that what Democrats attempted to do after taking power in 2021, namely, repairing institutions harmed by the first Trump administration, shouldn’t be the first port of call the next time the Democrats are in charge.
He said his party has been “too attached to a status quo that has been failing us for a long time.”
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (Getty Images)
“It is wrong to burn down the Department of Education, but I actually think it’s also wrong to suppose that the Department of Education was just right in 2024,” he added. “You could say the same thing about USAID. It is unconscionable that children were left to die by the abrupt destruction of USAID. Unconscionable. But it’s also wrong to suppose that if Democrats come back to power, our project should be to just tape the pieces together just the way that they were.”
The former Biden cabinet member also said that the scandal surrounding the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has had such staying power because of a “breakdown in societal trust.”
Many Americans don’t trust the government and don’t believe that all has been revealed about Epstein, who had expansive connections to wealthy and powerful people, including his former friend, Trump.
While Buttigieg noted to NPR that Epstein “was historically more of an area of interest for the MAGA base” compared to the Democrats, he defended the pressure that the party has put on Trump.
“You shouldn’t have to be a Republican or a Democrat to care about making sure there’s transparency on something as horrific as the abuses that happened. And to want to understand why an administration that promised to shed light on this decided not to,” said the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor.
When asked about the issue of the supposed cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s condition as he aged in office, Buttigieg said, “I told the truth, which is that he was old. You could see that he was old. And also, when it came to my ability to do my job and have my boss, my president, support me in that job, I always got whatever I needed from him, from the Oval Office.”
Buttigieg told NPR that he ‘told the truth’ about Biden’s aging while in office (AFP via Getty Images)
Buttigieg told NPR that the fear of political retribution or violence “is more real than at any point in my lifetime.”
He added that concerns about losing funding are “already impacting who gets invited to speak at a university or who gets hired at a law firm…. We can’t allow that.”
“The thing about the politics of fear is the more you give into it, the worse it gets. The only antidote to a politics of fear is a politics of courage,” said Buttigieg.
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