Pete Buttigieg offered a dose of reality for viewers on Fox, pointing out the lies and “cult of personality” of Donald Trump. The Biden transportation secretary, when asked about President Joe Biden’s fitness for office, turned the question around and cast doubt on Trump’s fitness to serve.
Fox News Sunday anchor Shannon Bream asked Buttigieg whether Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumed Democratic nominee, “was aware of how [Biden] was doing” before he made the decision to step down from the presidential race. Buttigieg acknowledged Biden’s age but pivoted to criticize Trump.
“Unlike Republicans — right — who in Trump’s personality cult will take a look at Donald Trump and say he’s perfectly fine, even though he seemed unable to tell the difference between Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, even though he’s rambling about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter, even though he is clearly older and stranger than he was when America got to know him, they say he’s strong as an ox, leaps tall buildings in a single bound. We don’t have that kind of warped reality on our side,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg went on to say that in stepping aside, Biden “made one of the most difficult decisions a president could make — ever” and “did something that I don’t think Donald Trump could even conceive of doing, which is putting his own interests aside for the country.”
He also highlighted the trail of broken promises Trump has made: “He didn’t keep his promise of six percent economic growth. He didn’t keep his promise to drain the swamp. Even before the pandemic, America went into a manufacturing recession … He broke his promise to pass an infrastructure bill, right? He said he would do that; he failed to do it. The Biden-Harris administration got it done.”
Buttigieg continued, “He even broke his promise to that Jan. 6 mob when he said, ‘I will be at your side when you march down to the Capitol.’ But he actually did keep two promises: He kept his promise to destroy the right to choose in this country, and he kept his promise on tax cuts for the rich.”
When Bream interjected to say that Trump “did say he wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade, but again, sent it to the states where they are hashing this out.”
“And empowered the states to eliminate women’s access to abortion and also, as you know, the Republican Party continues to be interested in a national abortion ban,” Buttigieg responded.
“Which [Trump] has disavowed completely,” Bream said.
“Yeah, he’s disavowed a lot of things,” Buttigieg said. “Because he lies all the time.”
It’s notable that Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy proposals for the next Republican administration, which was authored by many former Trump administration officials, calls for eliminating abortion access nationwide in addition to restricting reproductive health care. It proposes rolling back the FDA approval for abortion medications, calling them “the single greatest threat to unborn children.” It also would severely limit emergency contraceptive access, including IUDs and morning-after pills. Not only that, it would limit in vitro fertilization and surrogacy and employ the federal government in “abortion surveillance.”
The project paints a cruel, far-right vision of America, advocating for broad sweeping policy change, including rolling back climate change regulations, eviscerating the Environmental Protection Agency, and increasing fossil fuel production on public land. And it promises to enforce strict limits on immigration and to restrict eligibility for asylum claims while eliminating visas for immigrants who are victims of crime and human trafficking. Additionally, it proposes policies that would allow discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in the legal, social, and medical spheres.
Last year, a top Project 2025 official claimed that Trump was “very bought in” on its policy ideas, but earlier this month, that same official claimed that the idea Trump is linked to the project is a “hoax.” The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has selected a Project 2025 author as its platform policy director.
Trump has claimed to “know nothing” about Project 2025, but as Buttigieg so clearly stated, “He lies all the time.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”