Transportation Secretary and former Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg slammed Republican Vice President nominee J.D. Vance for his prior statements against former President Donald Trump.
On the air with Bill Maher on Friday, Buttigieg implied that Vance is more of an opportunist than a reformed Trump-loyalist despite being in Trump’s good graces since he won his Senate race in 2022.
Citing their shared midwest roots, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, criticized Vance as a person “who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead.”
“Five years ago, that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that’s what he talked about,” Buttigieg said.
The 39-year-old senator from Ohio rose to national prominence in 2016 following the publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy,” which had strong themes of the slow demise of Appalachian culture.
In the early stages of his political career, Vance was a strong critic of Trump, calling him a “total fraud,” a “moral disaster,” and “America’s Hitler.”
Vance, during this period, also referred to Trump and the cult of personality surrounding the current Republican nominee as an “opioid,” a phrase on which Buttigieg pounced.
Buttigieg called the opioid comment from Vance “kind of a weird thing to say about a person” to uproarious laughter from Maher’s audience.
“But I mean, for somebody whose identity is that they’re connected to Appalachia, which has an opioid crisis, that really is the darkest thing you could possibly say about Donald Trump,” said Buttigieg.
Although not referenced by Buttigieg or Maher, Vance’s personal history with his mother’s drug addiction, a main thread in his memoir, also adds weight to the criticism.
Maher also asked Vance about Vance’s supporter and primary financial backer, the founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel.
Thiel, like Buttigieg, married his longtime partner, and Maher highlighted that Vance is opposed to gay marriage.
Buttigeig said Thiel’s and other Silicon Valley billionaires’s backing of a Trump-Vance ticket is “not that complicated.”
“These are very rich men who have decided to go back to the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men,” said Buttigieg. “That’s kind of what you’re getting with J.D.”
Buttigieg compared Vance’s flip-flop to that of former Vice President Mike Pence, who Buttigieg characterized as compromising his Evangelical values to support Trump, “who was mixed up with a port star.”
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The Transportation Secretary added that although Pence got his “four glorious years” as vice president, “it ended on the west front of the Capitol with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government.”
“So I guess maybe not as a politician, but as a human being. What I’ll say is that I hope things work out a little bit better for J.D. Vance,” Buttigieg said.
