Pete Buttigieg gave Fox viewers a dose of reality, addressing Donald Trump’s lies and “cult of personality.” When Biden’s transportation secretary was asked about President Joe Biden’s fitness to serve, he flipped the question and cast doubt on Trump’s fitness to serve.
Fox News Sunday Host Shannon Bream asked Buttigieg if Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, was “aware of how [Biden] Buttigieg was talking about “what he was doing” before he decided to step down from the presidential race. Buttigieg acknowledged Biden’s age but shifted to criticizing Trump.
“Unlike Republicans — rightly so — who in the cult of Trump personality will look at Donald Trump and say he’s perfectly fine, even though he seems unable to tell the difference between Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, even though he talks a lot about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter, even though he’s older and weirder than he was when America first met him, they say he’s strong as a bull, leaping tall buildings in a single bound. We don’t have that kind of distorted reality on our side,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg added that by stepping down, Biden “made one of the hardest decisions a president could ever make” and “did something I don’t think Donald Trump would have even imagined, which was put his own interests aside for the sake of the country.”
He also highlighted a series of broken promises made by Trump: “He didn’t deliver on his promise of 6 percent economic growth. He didn’t deliver on his promise to drain the swamp. Even before the pandemic, America was in a manufacturing recession… He broke his promise to pass an infrastructure bill, right? He said he would do it, but he failed to do it. The Biden-Harris administration has delivered on that.”
“He broke his promise to the January 6 crowd when he said, ‘I will be with you when you go to the Capitol.’ But he actually kept two promises: He kept his promise to destroy the right to choose in this country, and he kept his promise to cut taxes for the wealthy,” Buttigieg continued.
When Brehm interrupted, saying that Trump “said he wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade, but again, he sent it to the states where they would debate it.”
“This law has enabled states to eliminate a woman’s right to abortion, and as you know, the Republican Party is still interested in banning abortion nationwide,” Buttigieg responded.
“any [Trump] “It's been completely disavowed,” Prim said.
“Yes, he has denied a lot of things, because he lies all the time,” Buttigieg said.
Notably, the 2025 Project, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy proposals for the incoming Republican administration, which were drafted by several former Trump administration officials, calls for eliminating access to abortion nationwide and restricting reproductive health care. The proposal proposes revoking FDA approval of abortion drugs, calling them “the greatest threat to unborn children.” It would also severely limit access to emergency contraception, including intrauterine devices and the morning-after pill. It would also restrict in vitro fertilization and surrogacy and employ the federal government in “abortion surveillance.”
The bill paints a harsh, far-right vision of America, calling for sweeping policy changes, including rolling back climate change regulations, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency and increasing fossil fuel production on public lands. It promises to impose strict immigration restrictions, restrict eligibility for asylum and revoke visas for immigrants who are victims of crime and human trafficking. It also proposes policies that would allow discrimination against LGBT people in the legal, social and medical fields.
Last year, a senior Project 2025 official claimed that Trump was “totally convinced” of its policy ideas, but earlier this month, the same official claimed that the idea of Trump’s association with the project was a “hoax.” Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has tapped one of the 2025 project’s authors as its policy director.
Trump has claimed to “know nothing” about Project 2025, but as Buttigieg pointedly put it, “He lies all the time.”
