I'm Dr.
by former Secretary of Transportation for Mayor, for Presidential candidate, all around Patriot, Pete Buttigieg, hi, how are you? Good, thanks for taking time to get together.
“Thanks for coming all the way from Michigan, what are you doing in Pennsylvania?”
Well, right now I am spending time supporting causes in candidates I believe in and I wanted to do that and here on the ground in Pennsylvania there's some really important congressional races coming up including one for Bob Brooks and Pennsylvania, seven to two I'm supporting. Really trying to lift up and amplify people who are focused on how politics can make everyday life better and I see that here and I see a lot of things here that remind me
where I grew up to and I grew up always west to here in Northern Indiana.
So really glad I got the chance to come out. Yeah, I mean, these are my people too, I feel like I said I'm only 30 minutes away and I understand sort of the complexity of the electorate here of the people here of, you know, their everyday struggles and what they're dealing with and contending with and what they're feeling right now. The energy out there, first of all, the place was packed, completely packed to the
rafters and people are so excited, they want something to do. They want someone to tell them what they can do, they don't necessarily know but they know that they want to get involved and that energy out there was electric.
“Yeah, you could feel it, I think because a lot of people understand we can't just sit around”
and it doesn't have to be this way, that's part of my message that you don't have to accept what's going on. The chaos, the cruelty, the failure in Washington to do, any of the things they said they would do to make life more affordable. We don't have to put up with that. But I think the challenge for people is one of my supposed to do today. If tomorrow was election day, that would be one thing but one of my supposed to do between
now and election. I'm here to remind folks that what you do every day matters, it matters to organize early for those campaigns that are coming up. And it's not just about campaigns and elections, it's about having your voice heard. You know, the times we've been able to get this administration to back down or get Congress to change its behavior, have all come from people
rising up. It's how we finally turned the tide and they'd sure that the Epstein files got released.
They didn't want to do that. Congress didn't want to do it and White House didn't want to do it. Changing what was going on with the tariffs, changing some of the votes around the health care affordable care act. That happened because the American people stood up and said, hey, you got to do some different. And so I want to make sure people understand their own power. Not just on election day, but between now and the next election.
One of those things right now that is very disheartening and very deeply, deeply unpopular. I think maybe a quarter at the most of the American people support this is what Donald Trump just did unilaterally in terms of attacking Iran. And I want to talk about that because the American people are looking at Congress right now going, um, hello, you know, is this thing on? What can you
“do? You have to rain this in. As we're sitting here, we've lost six service members. You've”
served in combat. All of my siblings have served in the military in some way, shape, or form.
That is an absolute tragedy. But this illegal war is weighing very heavily on the American people. And it's not going to help them in any way, shape, or form. It's certainly not going to make things less expensive here at home. But let's talk about that. But let's also talk about what Congress can do and how this is impacting us both here in terms of our bottom lands and our checkbooks. But also our national security. This war is going to make it even harder to deal with the things
that Americans are dealing with every day. Americans are paying the price literally in terms of the the tax dollars that are going into this war. Very likely that things like gas are going to become more expensive. And it's kind of the opposite what the president said he was going to do, right? He said it was going to bring a world peace and focus on lowering our costs. And instead, our costs are up directly because of some of the things he did. And now we're in a new war. And
from everything that we can see, it's a war of choice. You know, when I was deployed into Afghanistan, I did so believing that my chain of command would only send us into harm's way if there was no alternative. And what I see happening right now is that that basic credibility, just the president hasn't even tried to explain to the American people or to the troops or to the Congress, real reasons why this couldn't be avoided. So now Congress has a job to do. You know,
these service members could put everything on the line and six of them. And I can't stop thinking about them because I, you know, when you go over one of the things you visualize, least I know I did, is what would be like if it was your family getting that knock on the door. And six families in counting have gotten that knock on the door. And if you're going to ask families to go through that and service members to put their lives on the line, the very minimum the Congress
should be ready to do is to sit in Washington and take a vote and put their names against an upper-down vote on whether they're going to allow this. That is the bare minimum. And Congress needs to do its job. They haven't even been able to settle on a justification or an explanation. It's a moving target. It was an imminent threat. It was that they had, they had a nuclear weapon
Within a week.
Donald Trump contradicted that. Yeah, the story keeps changing. You know, at one point they said
“it was an imminent attack, but there's no, no indication of that. And the nuclear threat is”
something that the president himself assured us was obliterated the last time he bombed around last year, right? Then they say it's about regime change, but that's exactly what the president said he wouldn't do is to plunge us into a regime change war. And don't get me wrong. I hate this regime. This regime was trying to kill us too. You know, when we were deployed, we knew that that a lot of the IED materials, they called them explosively foreign projectiles, EFPs, they could rip through
even an armored vehicle. And that was provided in many cases by the Iranians going into Iraq and Afghanistan. So these are, these are some bad people. The idea that you can change a regime who's entire ideologies about hating America by just knocking off the top leader and that you're going to be able to control that process without any troops on the ground, that you know what's going to have the next. Is this anything we've learned as a country? It's that a selective regime
change war in the Middle East can lead to things that you didn't plan on. Well, right, that's 9/11,
“another terrorist cell, another terrorist group's rising up. That's that's part of this, right?”
The American people are looking at this. They don't really, my text to my friends, my girlfriends, I'm like, "Did you guys know we were bombed around?" And they're like, "What? They don't know what we're doing there. There is no plan for extracting us out of this." But it's not on the top of four front of their minds because they're still grappling with an economy right now. There's everything harder. I mean, my electric bill is a rhyme that tends to infinity.
It's gone up so much dark. I forget to healthcare, et cetera. It's just groceries. You know, your dollar just doesn't go nearly as far. So let's talk about those issues because people will tell you, Donald Trump is doing this to distract from this. And this to distract from this. And that's probably all true. It's probably a Russian-nusting dollar distraction. But at the end of the day, he is failing the American people under fundamental everyday issues that we are all experiencing
in real time. Right. And it's not even that he's trying to bring prices down, but failing. It's that he's actively bringing prices up. Right? When you slap a tariff on everything we buy, that is a tax that we all have to pay. It's about $1,000 per household last year. And he's insisting, even though the Supreme Court said it's unlawful, he's insisting on finding some other way to keep doing it. When you look at your power bill, like you were saying, going through the roof,
you know, part of that is they're killing energy projects, clean energy generation and transmission projects. It would add sources of power to this country and take some of that pressure off. He's killing those kinds of projects, right? And sometimes they're killing transportation projects. So they're going to block a new bridge to Canada that the Canadians paid for. By the way, they actually did. Mexico didn't pay for the wall, but Canada did pay for this bridge.
And he wants to block it because it turns out the guy who owns the old bridge, which is for profit,
got to him and put a million bucks into a super PAC support in Trump. So there's some,
yeah, through London at the same, you know, who's been busy explaining what he was doing on Jeffrey Epstein's Island. So, you know, people get that this is not the behavior of an administration that has our best interests at heart. This is administration that's looking out for, you know, kind of person who can spend six figures on a membership card tomorrow logo. The kind of people who can donate a million bucks to a Trump super PAC or or to the big ballroom that he's building
for fancy dinners at the White House or, you know, in the case of some of these foreign contributions, right into his crypto fund. I mean, this is happening. They're not, it's not even a controversy whether it's happening. We all know it's happening. That's who gets their way in this Washington.
“And it doesn't have to be that way. That's what I keep insisting that we can put forward”
candidates. And by the way, we should reach out to people to vote for this president, thinking that maybe he was going to do something to make their lives better. And he has broken every promise that he's made to them. All right, quick thing before I get back to the show. I've been trying one skin and I actually love this stuff. I'm pretty picky about skin care because most of it is either time stuff's long or full of ingredients that make my skin angry. This one is
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they really resonated with me, your wife, you're talking about your children. And you said, you know, how are they going to look at me years from now and ask me what I did in this moment. That is also my wife. My kids are 12, almost routine and 16. And I've been on this journey
From 2016 when I put them to bed telling them that Hillary Clinton would be t...
elected when they woke up in the morning. And you know, you've little kids, so they were seven and four at the time, and they said, "Like it was a Marvel movie." I said, "The good guy will win." You know, like, sometimes the bad guy wins for a moment, and then the good guy prevails, because I'm just saying, it seemed like it was a foregone conclusion. So when my then seven-year-old son woke up and said, "It's all me crying in the bathroom," and said, "But
how did this happen?" You said, "The good guy would win." I didn't have an answer for him,
and I had to make sure that I did everything I could to make that right, never expecting
it to be back here in this position for more years, or however many years it is now later,
“but my kids are also my wife. I think again, for a lot of Americans right now, they're looking”
at this country. And it's not even a part of an issue. They're wondering what kind of country they are going to be leaving behind because children in their grandchildren because the country they're seeing right now around them doesn't look familiar. It looks scary, it looks dark, it looks even more hateful than it ever has before. But here's another thing to remember. You know, I'm not disputing the results of the last election, but if you look at who is actually maga, like who
actually identifies as strongly supporting this president, it's in the 20% range, 20 to 30%, it is not most of this country, it is not even half of this country. You got to have to vote because he took over one of the two parties and in our two-party system, winter take all, that can happen. A movement that only has like a quarter of the people behind it can actually run the table sometimes and take over the country. By the way, that's one of the reasons why I think we
should look at some reforms to the system to make it a little more reflective of what the people want. But my bigger point here is that they're doing a very good job of trying to fool people into thinking that most people are with them. But most Americans disapprove of the president's handling of the economy. They disapprove of what he's doing with immigration. There is not widespread support among
“the American people for this new war of choice. And that's very important to remember, too, to”
let people know who don't think this is this is right, but they look around and they're not sure if they're the only one that you're definitely not alone, actually most Americans are with you. Yeah, and it took last two questions. He's deeply underwater and just about every issue, immigration, the economy, et cetera. He knows that the polling is bad, but in this war is bad. The inevitable question, right, we talk about with the people being the antidote to this moment,
but the inevitable question, because we've seen many examples of what he will do, is will we have free and fair elections in November and beyond? Because we can't suffer from a lack of imagination. We saw the lengthy would go to in 2020 on January 6th. We've seen what he's done with Fulton County. We've seen the things the threats that made to the state of Minnesota, this memorandum, we're meeting whatever they have. They're bringing in the same characters from 2020.
So, what would you say to people about these midterms, whether or not we'll be able to have our voices heard, because if we have our voices heard freely, we should have, as cliches it is, a pendulum swing, but I know people are worried about that. I'm worried about that,
but what would you say to us when to the worries? Well, first of all, that we have to get
twice as involved if we're worried about that, because we have to make sure that we're doing
“everything we can so that it's not even close. And I believe we can do that. These kinds of maneuvers”
only work. These kinds of tricks that they want to play, if it's a close selection. The other thing I would say is that the ultimate safeguard, the ultimate backstop, even more important in the courts, which are important, but the ultimate backstop is the American people. He cannot pull that off if the American people make it clear every time we stand up that we will not stand for that. Some of these marches coming up, there's another no-kings march coming at the end of this month.
And those are a very, very important show. Matter of fact, there's a, there's been a finding historians and political scientists to found that any time more than about three and a half percent, you might have heard of this finding, three and a half percent of the people stand up. Okay, yeah. Then a, then a, an authoritarian regime usually does not survive that. And that doesn't sound like a huge number, but does it as a huge number? I mean, cross-American people, that's like
10 million or more than 10 million. This next event in late March could be the one that breaks
that mark. And when that kind of thing happens, it just isn't possible to fool that many Americans or to get away with that sort of thing. Yeah, and the flagship march is Minneapolis, which is a good place to sort of leave this off because the people of Minnesota, to your earlier points, about, you know, saying what the American people can actually force when they all stand together and they use the forces, the people of Minneapolis, people of Minnesota, they really,
have shown such resilience and resolve in the face of tyranny. And that's again where the next march is going to be where the flagship march is. So can you talk kind of about that and marry it with your idea of what hope looks like in this moment? It's incredible, not just the way they have stood up, not just standing up politically, protesting, but also the way they have stood up for each other, neighbors, helping neighbors. People making sure that kids are looked after if
their parents are afraid to go outside. So many examples of people doing the human
Thing, I would argue the Christian thing of looking after as we were counsele...
face tradition that I know of and every moral tradition, religious or not, that we're supposed to be
looking out for others. We saw that on display and we saw some real, I would like to call it Midwestern political toughness out there. Minus 20 degrees, people marching by the thousands, that matters. You know, if you look at the countries where democracy was stamped out, one of the big things that the people in charge stamped out was things like that. People think of the streets because they, it sounds old fashioned. I know in our digital world, but there is no substitute for that.
And when people come out in the streets, it's not just that the world sees damage that they see
each other. And it builds community. It builds those social connections. And it builds the courage that allows us to take the next step. One of the things that I keep thinking about this year, something I heard a wise man say about the nature of hope, which is that hope is the consequence of action more often than the cause of action. I think about that a lot because it it's counsels us that we shouldn't just wait around for something to give us. Hope that we
“create the reasons for hope by taking that action. And that's what I see people in Minnesota and”
people around the country doing. Yeah, Jason Crowe, Congress of Jason Crowe says that here's
contagious but hope is contagious as well. Very good. So those are some notes that I definitely take to heart before I let you go. Absolutely last question or promise. I have been a great governor Shapiro. Was there in her stomach a couple of weeks ago, had Governor Gavin Newsom on last week on the podcast. And I would be remiss if I didn't ask you. You're definitely considered one of the front runners. I know you're probably, I know what you're into. We'll probably be. But I do have to
ask you about 2028 in your aspirations for running for president, because I know a lot of people would like to see that. Yeah, I mean, a lot when people say that, I'm a long way from being able to approach a decision like that. What I know is, you know, my name's on about right now, but a lot of
“names are, and that's why I'm campaigning for candidates and causes I believe in. 2026 is going to be a”
pivotal year. It's not going to solve all our problems, but it is absolutely imperative that we have a good outcome. So I'm going to make myself useful to the people who actually are running. Then we'll see what else I can do. And no matter what, I know that I'll be doing whatever I can to make a difference. And so that I have a good answer by the time my kids are old enough to look me in the eye and say, Papa, what were you? What were you doing back in the 2020s?
I love it. And you're not done in Pennsylvania. You're going on after here to other students, states, and swing districts. So where are you going next? Yeah, we'll spend a little more time in Pennsylvania than I'll be actually spending some time in Alabama, maybe not considered a
“swing state, but it's a place where I think my party needs to to speak up, and there's an opportunity”
to commemorate the heroes of the civil rights march. They're on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. I want to make sure to be a part of that, and I'm looking forward to it. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for everything that you're doing. Thank you for taking all of this time to talk to to me and thanks for coming out. - I'm glad I got the chance.
- Thanks so much. - Thanks guys.
