Pete Buttigieg Thinks Democrats Can't Go Back

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm Jon Favreau.

My guest this Sunday is Pete Budigej, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, presidential candidate in 2020, transportation secretary in the Biden administration.

And now he's just Pete.

He's just out there and he's making the rounds.

And we're really excited that he sat down with us at Pod Save America.

We talked about the future of the Democratic Party, whether we're a dictatorship yet, J.D.

Vance, AI, Biden in the 2024 campaign, Gaza, lots more.

It was a great conversation with Pete.

And stick around after the conversation because John Lovett is going to join me and we are going to answer a few listener questions.

Now, here's my conversation with Pete Buttigieg.

Pete, welcome back to the pod.

Thanks, good to be with you again.

So, we are now six months into Donald Trump's second term.

Feels like six years.

How are you feeling?

I mean, it's not great, right?

So many of the things that we worried about, that we feared that we saw coming, we're seeing even more of that than we would have guessed.

And one of the things that strikes me is it's not just the things that the left worried about or that liberals worried about.

It's things that traditionally conservatives worried about.

Like I've been thinking back to dorm room arguments I had with libertarians, you know, when I was in college who thought that like someday, if we weren't careful, there would be, you know, masked federal agents snatching people off the streets just because of what they put in an op-ed.

And I was like, that is such a crazy libertarian fever dream.

And now that's happening.

So all of that, obviously.

very bad.

At the same time, you know, I'm also seeing a lot of people standing up to this, even with very little power in Washington.

I see people taking a stand where they can.

What's going on with Texas Democrats has been a good example of that.

And the other big thing on my mind is that, you know, with all of these things, all these institutions in our government and our society being burned down, it's a terrible thing, but also presents a very important moment in our, I think, near future to rebuild them on better terms.

There's just the fact that we have to get out of this moment in order to get to that one.

Yeah, let's talk about getting out of this moment.

Rachel Maddow said on her show this week,

we do now have a consolidating dictatorship in this country.

And I hadn't thought about it in quite such stark terms until she said it.

Do you agree?

Do you think that's where we are?

I mean, that's definitely what they're trying to do.

You know,

we could argue the finer points of how successful they've been, but the biggest mark of success

by the Trump administration in terms of trying to be that controlling, trying to be dictatorial, to me, isn't what's happening directly with the government.

It's what's happening indirectly.

It's the self-editing that we're seeing happen at broadcasters and universities and private firms, law firms and others.

You know, that's the real hallmark of losing your grasp on freedom.

It's not just direct government interference with everyday private life.

It's a society that begins to do things differently because they don't want to run the risk of pissing off the government.

And that's just, again, whether you're liberal or conservative or libertarian, that's so the opposite of what America is about.

But for that very reason, I think this can be overcome.

Yeah, so it feels to me like we are in this vicious cycle where a loss of trust in institutions caused people to turn away from politics or turn to Trump, who is now destroying those institutions, which is leading to even less trust, which is leading even more people to turn away from politics, which is letting Trump get away with even more destruction.

Do you have thoughts on how we break that cycle?

Obviously, if we gain power again, we can sort of use that power to restore people's faith in institutions.

But first, we got to get back to power.

Yeah, I think actually both of those go hand in hand.

So

it starts by understanding that, you know, frankly, I think restore might not be the right kind of dominant word for us to be thinking about.

I mean, I totally agree with you on restoring trust, but we're not just trying to put back what they've broken.

Our political program has to be so much more than that, because it's not just that these institutions have been destroyed.

It's that they've actually been on the wrong track for a long time.

So you look at USAID, you look at the Department of Education, it is definitely wrong to burn them to the ground.

However, it would also be wrong to just try to put them back the way they were in 2024.

If we got a magic wand, were suddenly in charge of everything,

we'd be responsible for building institutions that actually made sense in the 2020s.

And the reason I think this is related to the other part of your question is actually, I think what's right substantively is also very important politically, right?

People don't want a restoration of the status quo.

We won't win by saying everything they're doing is wrong, put us in charge, and we'll have it just back the way it was before.

We wouldn't be here if

people could tolerate the problems we were living with with an economy, a politics, a society that was getting less and less responsive to what the people's needs were.

You know, I would argue throughout our lifetime, you and I are roughly the same age.

I think our generation has witnessed more policy failure than not.

If we're not on top of that, not only will we not have the right answer should we come to power, but we're going to have a lot harder time earning our way back to power anyway.

One decision I feel like Democrats have to make even before we get back into power is, you know, Trump 2.0 consolidated a lot of power in the presidency through arguably legal means.

For example, you know, the Department of Justice is supposed to be independent, but there's no law that says that.

Should Democrats say, if you put us back in the White House, you know, we'll make sure we'll restore independence, integrity to the Justice Department and the FCC and the Fed.

Or should Democrats say, you know, Trump, we're going to use the power that Trump accumulated to show people we can deliver and make sure that, you know, someone like Trump doesn't take power again?

Trevor Burrus: Yeah, I think we really have to fix the systems.

It can't just be about being an equal and opposite version of Trump.

I think in many ways, that's actually a contradiction in terms.

And some of the things we're defending are, I don't know, good policies that you could do with

the DOJ in the right hands.

But one of the biggest things we're defending is the very idea that the DOJ shouldn't be operated on political means.

So if we take over and do the same thing to advance more liberal policies, don't get me wrong, I want us to advance liberal policies, but we also have to get back to the fundamentals of what it means to have a healthy republic.

And

you look at things like the gerrymandering situation, right?

Look, if they're going to do it in Texas,

it is, I think, totally appropriate for us to respond and fight fire with fire in other states.

But clearly the best answer for the country, and I think in the end, for our party and for all parties, is to actually fix it and actually have fair districts.

So nobody feels tempted to push that button in the first place.

And I know that political reform, structural reform is usually not a sexy topic.

Although, you know, I'm old enough to remember when John McCain was galvanizing people around campaign finance reform.

Like, it can be done, even though it's hard.

And I think we've got to on things like fair districts, things like money in politics.

I've long argued for us to reform the Supreme Court to make it less political.

We can't just ride the same tiger there on and expect it to work out well.

Trump has now broken a number of promises he made in the election.

Plenty of focus on Epstein over the last month.

Not yet as much focus on the promise we learned he broke this week.

The White House told the Washington Post they won't be doing anything to cover IVF, even though Trump promised they would multiple times during the campaign, put out an executive order in February requiring various agencies to report back on the best ways to

reduce the cost of IVF in 50 days, 60 days.

Nothing has happened.

And then the administration told the Post, yeah, it's not going to happen.

How do you tell people who voted for him or believed him that they should still trust other politicians when they promised things like that?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's look at the results, right?

Look at the promises he's broken, but also look at the promises he's kept.

And same for us, right?

I mean, look, we came in promising to do both Donald Trump and our side promised to do a big infrastructure bill.

He broke his promise and didn't do it.

We kept our promise and we did do it.

I'm not saying that our side, our party, has been perfect, but I think we can point to very specific results that are increasingly affecting your actual everyday life.

So we're not just talking about theories.

We're talking about whether you actually can access IVF.

We're talking about healthcare.

A lot of people, and as somebody who is

newly self-employed this year, I happen to be one of them recently.

A lot of people have healthcare who would not have been able to get it if it weren't for the ACA and Obamacare, right?

Like these are real specific things in your life that are different based on who's in charge.

And you are running the risk of losing even more a chance at access to IVF or for those who are counting on Medicaid or a whole bunch of protections that are being dismantled around us.

Protections from getting screwed by banks that the CFPB put in that they're getting rid of.

We can show that we'll protect you that way because we have.

And

a whole set of other things.

So look, building trust is going to take a generation, I think.

And that's just the reality of what our politics have come to.

But we're not doing this in a vacuum.

Like we can look at what's actually happened.

What they've actually done is actually cut taxes for the wealthiest people in this country and actually cut services for other Americans in order to pay for it.

Do you think Democrats should run on Trump's promise from the campaign that insurance companies should be required to cover IVF and fertility treatments?

I think it's good policy.

I mean, if we're really serious about being pro-family, then we need to make sure that we support that.

And that means making sure whether it's a system of direct government support or whether it's ensuring that

that's part of what you can get from private health care.

One way or the other, we've got to recognize that in a country, and by the way,

I think that the right has been weird about it, but I don't think we should scoff at those who are interested in making sure that we encourage more people to be able to start families and have more kids if they want to, especially if the reason they're not doing it is artificial issues around cost or access to care.

Yeah.

So I've been thinking about a lot about this speech that J.D.

Vance gave over the 4th of July weekend at the Claremont Institute, which is a very right-wing MAGA think tank for those who don't know.

And the reason it's been on my mind is, and I brought it up on the pod last month, I think it's probably the most honest articulation of their political project that I feel like deserves a thoughtful response from our party.

And I'm just going to play the key part for you, and maybe you can respond.

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.

What do I mean by that?

Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Must we admit all of them tomorrow?

If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.

But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists.

Even though very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025.

I think the people whose ancestors fought in the the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

What do you think about that?

So there's a lot to unpack there.

This speech has been on my mind too.

Let's start with the straw man, right?

Nobody seriously thinks that just because America is a nation committed to ideals, that if you agree with the Declaration of Independence, then you get to move here and become a citizen.

Like he's just making that up so that he can knock it right down.

But then he goes on to basically say that American ideals have nothing to do with what it means to be an American.

What really matters is how long your family has been here, which is this kind of blood and soil nationalism that

frankly cuts against exactly what makes America special.

I mean, one way to think about it is the fact that we have the word un-American, and that gets thrown around sometimes in some really irresponsible and ugly ways.

But the fact we even think about that means that we have some sense that

being American, being true to what America is all about, is related to your commitment to our freedoms and to the ideals that are laid out in the Declaration and in the Constitution,

that that matters in a way that you just I don't think you could be un-French or un-Japanese for a parallel reason.

It's a huge part of what's special about America.

It's a huge part of why America won the Cold War is because our ideals, as well as our everyday life, were better.

We've got to lay out a way of being American and belonging here that doesn't depend on whether your ancestors fought in the Civil War.

Maybe they did and maybe they didn't.

Great.

Although, look, some of those ancestors were fighting against America in the Civil War.

So instead of making it about that, you know, let's recognize that everyone who is here is part of the same national project.

And it's the experiment in self-governance that Lincoln talked about.

I don't believe that my mother, who probably does have ancestors who were in the Revolutionary War, is any more or less American than my father, who immigrated here in the 70s to get an education and chose to become an American citizen.

It's about our fidelity to the American Project, which is exactly what those in power right now are not showing.

Fidelity to the freedoms that make this country what it is.

I was somewhat surprised to learn that national conservatives and the MAGA right

are so open about their distaste for the Declaration of Independence as like a foundation of what it means to be American.

But they are, and now we have the Vice President of the United States very open about that.

I also think it presents us, presents Democrats, presents anyone who isn't fond of MAGA or Donald Trump, a real opportunity to step in and say, we're actually the people who believe in the core values that founded this country, even if the people who founded it were far from perfect.

Totally.

And you know what, another way of talking about what I think Democrats should do is that we should pay attention to two different things.

One is policies you can fight over and be against.

So, you know,

more taxation of wealthy people or the right to abortion or marriage equality or background checks on guns.

You know, those are things you could be against.

As Democrats, we're for them.

Most Americans are for them, but it's a legitimate policy fight.

There's another set of things that all of us should be able to get behind.

And, you know, the whole point of the Declaration and the Constitution was to encode those in a way and then make everybody who takes office, left, right, or center, literally put up a right hand and swear, I've done it, that you're going to uphold that Constitution and those universal values.

And I don't think there's a better expression of them than the Declaration and the Constitution.

I've seen others.

I've been part of a project called We Hold These Truths, which consists of people from the left, the right, and the center coming together to put together statements around something that should be universal.

And then we can still fight, but the fighting with regard to those principles is about who's doing a better job of living up to them, not whether they're worthwhile.

We shouldn't be sitting around having fights over whether freedom of speech is a good thing.

We can argue over whether this or that case lives up to our commitments to freedom of the speech,

but those things should not be something that you can be against and hold your head up high in American politics.

Trump said this week that J.D.

Vance is his most likely heir apparent.

You played J.D.

Vance in debate prep with Tim Walsh.

What are your impressions of him and his seemingly inevitable candidacy in 2028?

Well, I think he's very intelligent.

I think he's very smooth.

I think he's very capable.

That's why we definitely shouldn't, I know there's a temptation to make fun of him, but I can do it with the best of them sometimes when you see how he conducts himself out there.

But let's be clear, we're talking about a very smart person, not a very principled person.

It didn't take him many years to go from comparing Trump to Hitler,

which he did,

to saying that he ought to be the leader of the free world.

This is somebody who

made his name talking about being from the industrial Midwest and kind of explaining the industrial Midwest to coastal elites.

I know a little bit about

what that's like.

And then became wealthy, went to Silicon Valley, kind of ran with a lot of people that we would consider to have kind of centrist or even center-left values, and then saw the writing on the wall and found this path to power.

When you have somebody who's that intelligent and that unprincipled in a role like that, I think it's really dangerous, especially because to the extent that he has found religion, has found principles other than just trying to take power, he seems to be getting more and more attached to this kind of blood and soil nationalism that, you know, if that prevails, would would make us just another country out there instead of the country that we all know and love.

Yeah, what worries me most about him is that

at first I thought, well, he saw a path to, this is where the Republican Party was going.

This is a path to power for him.

But he seems to believe it now.

And I think that believing in this sort of blood and soil nationalism is even more alarming than someone who just does it to get ahead because it means when the, you know, when push comes to shove, the decisions he would make and is making already in this white house are um are pretty extreme and pretty pretty far from uh what the constitution and declaration say i mean he is you know he has i just heard him say the other week he's like me and stephen miller are the most far right uh on immigration in the whole white house Yep, I could believe that.

And yeah, look, at the end of the day, I can't scan his soul to know whether he just shapeshifted his way into this or whether he's believed this all along and it's finally come to light.

But either way, you know, you've got somebody who really wants America to become an ethno-national state.

And there's a lot of countries like that out there.

One of the best things about America is that we're not one of them.

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Let's talk about Democrats.

On one hand, not surprising that voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party right now.

Just the party just lost a very big, important election.

Democratic voters, naturally pissed about that.

On the other, the party has the lowest favorability rating in like three or four decades.

What do do you think that's about?

A lot of things.

I mean, one, that's how it feels when you're out of power.

Two, I think a sense that the party, especially the party with the capital P, just hasn't been responsive to what's most on voters' minds.

And I think now a desire to see us aiming a little higher and being more ambitious in our ideas.

And look, we always run the risk of fighting the last war, thinking a little too hard about the last election instead of the next one.

I actually think we have an enormous opportunity opportunity as a party to get ahead of the issues that are coming our way.

You think about something like AI.

This is one of the most economically, socially, politically transformative things to hit this country since the founding.

And we can learn a lot, especially a lot from things that didn't go quite right in terms of how we handled the arrival of the internet.

or the arrival of trade and automation that really created a lot of wreckage where I was growing up in Indiana in the 1990s and early 2000s.

We can offer something different and better that's a proactive vision instead of what we're seeing from the administration right now, which is basically checking AI to make sure it isn't too woke, whatever that means.

I think about AI a lot and I've been really getting worried about it.

And I saw that you wrote a sub stack on it, which was great.

But I share your concerns, which is, you know, people talk a lot about, oh, the robot's going to kill us all, sort of the more apocalyptic versions of what happens with AI.

I worry about the economic dislocation, which it seems like no one is talking about as much or enough.

I haven't heard or seen any great policy ideas to deal with it, other than like, you know, some people giving a nod to universal basic income, but it doesn't seem like giving people, you know, $1,000 a month when they have no job and no prospect for another kind of job is going to really...

is going to really do it.

I also worry that our political system did not adequately help cushion the blow of post-industrial transformation.

And that was when our political system was less broken than it is now.

It's even like we can barely handle keeping the government open, let alone trying to figure out policies

to deal with AI.

And that's on the economic side.

And then on the just, you know, and you've written this, it's just, it's about changing like what it means to be human and what it means to interact with one another.

And I really, you know, you have kids, I have kids.

Like I really worry about, you know setting a kid up with a chat bot and that becomes the the important relationship and friendship in their lives um have i know you've been looking into this have you seen or come across any interesting ideas that you feel like okay this this might not solve our problems but this could like take us in in the right direction on ai well i think there are some important ideas that are being developed around how to make sure that the american people get more of a share of the enormous wealth that's being created with ai because in addition to all of the problems that you just listed, which I think are massive, there's also the fact that we already have a level of concentration of power and wealth in this country that, as a general rule, is hard for a democracy to survive.

And it's about to, or at least it could get much, much more concentrated because so much wealth and value accumulates to the handful of people who own these AI models.

the associated physical plant of the chips and the processing, the data centers.

So I think for that reason, as well as the fact that a lot of people are going to experience economic disruption, finding a way to get people dealt in, ideally on

some share of the value being created.

I think UBI, universal basic income, that was kind of the 1.0 answer to this.

It was very fashionable about 10 years ago.

I think we've learned a lot about why it wasn't quite delivering the values as advertised.

But I do think as we think about the next response to that, the core of it's important, which is we need to make people whole.

We need to get them kind of dealt in on the value being created, which is only fair since these things trained on data that all of us put out there and the fact that the American taxpayer literally funded the invention of the internet.

I mean, I think there's a way to do this where business still gets to be business, but Americans

get a piece of the pie.

And we've got to pay attention to that because I was there as a kid.

When they came along to my part of the country in what is now the so-called Rust Belt and and said, guess what?

All this technology is coming.

All this trade's coming.

Don't worry about your slice because the pie is going to get so much bigger that everyone will be better off.

And guess what?

The pie got bigger, but not everyone was better off.

This is going to be faster and more intense than that.

We can get it right this time.

But even if we fix the income issues, there's a profound set of issues around belonging that I think we need to pay more attention to.

This is where quote unquote retraining, which I think is very popular, definitely in the Democratic Party around the time I was coming to age, misses misses something fundamentally important, which is that

what you do for a living is not just how you make your money, it's how you fit.

It's who you are.

Now that I have kids, they're three, they're about to be four.

I see how they look at the world and they totally understand somebody's kind of existence as a grown-up based on whether they're a teacher or a firefighter or a worker, whatever it is they do.

Add to that the fact that as fundamentally important as your job, your trade is for blue-collar workers who've been displaced, especially by trade and automation.

Many of the white-collar workers who are about to be displaced,

some of them are even more intensely wrapped up in their job as a sense of who they are.

Think about how important it is to doctors that they're doctors, right?

And frankly, doctors, architects, engineers, lawyers, programmers are among those whose whole industries may be disrupted profoundly, not in 30 years, but in like three to five.

Yeah.

No,

it's concerning.

One of the debates from 2024 that I'm still having with myself is

we know the top concern of most voters for the last few decades, especially now, has either been jobs or cost of living economic issues.

And that's obviously especially true today.

People want to know who's going to fight to make their lives better.

So as Democrats, let's talk about that.

But also, as we talked about, Donald Trump's secret police force is rounding people up without due process and he wants to send the military to more cities and he's extorting any company or institution or ally that disagrees with him.

It is tempting to say we should obviously talk about both, but we're also competing for people's attention with all the other dumb, crazy shit in their algorithmic feeds.

What is the central argument you think Democrats should be making to people in the next few years, knowing that we have this very difficult information environment with which to get our message through.

So to me, the touchstone is everyday life.

And the argument is it doesn't have to be this way.

Everything in your life, from what it's like to deal with a cable company to whether you can afford to buy a home to the kinds of dumb political arguments you're having with your uncle.

could all be better if we had different and better leadership.

And, you know, with the technologies we were just talking about, the political developments and so many other things changing, we actually have a shot to get it more right than it's been in a very long time, which we better, because right now it's more wrong than it's been in a very long time.

And if we're talking about everyday life, I do think that starts with the economy.

That starts with: do you have a good, steady job?

Can you afford with the pay that you get from that job to get the things that you want and need in your life, from healthcare to childcare to housing?

And I think that we would be well served to be extremely disciplined in talking about that.

But we can talk about the other issues,

the the high-minded, academic, almost sounding stuff about freedom and democracy in terms of that everyday life.

I mean, part of how I talk about it is the cast of characters who are in charge right now.

So if we had a functioning Congress capable of standing up to the president, if he wasn't trying to be a dictator and roll people, then you wouldn't be getting some of the appointees that we now have in charge of our lives.

And this is not an academic thing, right?

Like your kid and my kid is less safe because we have just learned learned that RFK is canceling the development of vaccines that could get us ahead of bird flu.

Like that's a real thing that will affect our lives.

And I don't think it would happen under a left or right administration if we had a healthier democracy.

The Secretary of Education, the person in charge of educating our kids, has given speeches talking about A1, which means she doesn't understand that it stands for AI, which means she is unaware of the most important development affecting education since the invention of the pencil.

That's definitely going to affect your school and your kid, and it wouldn't happen if we had a functioning democracy, which is part of what we're trying to build here.

So I think we can tie all of these things together, but the touchstone always has to be things that we can explain in terms of everyday life, not just for political reasons, but because philosophically, I believe that's the whole point of being in politics in the first place, is that if we get it right, everyday life gets better.

So I don't think this is the biggest problem, but in the bucket of trust issues that people have with the Democratic Party, one thing I worry about is that the Democratic Party has real work to do, rebuilding trust with voters after an election where most of the Democratic establishment assured them that Joe Biden was still the strongest candidate to run against Trump until it was almost too late.

And look, I mean...

I voiced concerns about Biden after the debate.

I've voiced some concerns before the debate.

I still wish I had said more earlier.

First, because I wanted wanted to win the election, but also because I do worry about sort of, in a low trust environment, further eroding trust with voters, voters who think, well, politicians are all the same and it's all a system and everyone takes care of each other.

Am I wrong to worry about that?

No, I think that's on a lot of people's minds.

And I think we've got to take seriously the conversations people are having and the questions they have.

Look, to me, it was a matter of, yes, it became clear, clearer and clearer, especially after the debate,

that it would be better to have a different nominee.

And eventually, even Joe Biden himself came to understand and admit that and act accordingly.

Another thing was also true, which is that when Joe Biden was the nominee, for a lot of us, certainly for me, it was very clear that our country needed the outcome of that election to be Joe Biden and not Donald Trump as our next president, because it's one thing to have somebody who is old, who is also a good man, who has led the way on good policies.

And it's another to have somebody who attempted to overthrow the constitutional system of this country.

So the choice was clear, but the choice got better when President Biden stepped aside.

And there's going to be a lot of coulda, shoulda, woulda about 2024.

But you can also tell how different our country and our world is becoming before our eyes.

And that much more will it be true by 2026, by 2028 and beyond.

You and I have certainly witnessed quite a few intra-party ideological fights over the years.

You experienced them during the 2020 primary.

What lessons have you taken from those as we head into a few years of primaries that will almost certainly feature spirited ideological debates within the Democratic Party?

The biggest thing for me is the importance of

couching whatever you're getting from the internet in actual offline conversations with people about where they want the country to go.

I think our whole party, myself included, got very absorbed in largely online fights.

I think now, don't get me wrong, I mean, look, digital media are probably more important than a lot of traditional media now in terms of how people get their information.

But the structure of them, the way the algorithm works, makes it way too easy to confuse the loudest voices with most voices.

And I think we learned a lot of things the hard way in that cycle and in some of the things that have happened since.

I'm a big believer for a lot of reasons, but this is one of them, in spending more time offline, in old-fashioned interaction with people where you watch the faces rise and fall, you talk to them.

I learned so much doing five town halls a day in Iowa that you just can't learn from reading reports or polls or

that torrent of feedback that comes that just gets mainlined into us through these algorithms.

And I think we need to, look, when we have a strong position that is morally important, we're going to take it and we're going to defend it.

We're also going to try to do it in a way that meets people where they are instead of

sticking a finger in their eye.

And right now, the logic of the feed is that it serves up one of two things.

Here's this person I already agree with looking good.

Here's this person I already don't like doing something that reminds me why I don't like them.

And that's it.

Those are not the center of gravity of what a healthy politics is about.

Yeah.

How much attention have you paid to the abundance discourse?

A lot.

And look, I think that a lot of what they identified really reminds me of some of the biggest frustrations and

challenges that we had when I was trying to build things across the country.

I'm proud of what we got done.

We got more than 20,000 transportation projects done across the country, but we could have done more quicker.

And it's really important, especially if we want to meet the challenges of

the green energy economy, the need to have more distribution of power, the need to deal with housing, that we not allow a kind of proceduralism to get in our way.

Now, look, we're going to do the right thing.

I think we always need to be committed to

inclusive and thorough processes.

But another example of something that we can do differently than just warming up the things we inherited is to think anew in a way that we haven't maybe since the 30s, 40s, and 50s, about what it means to have enough process that there's not

terrible unintended consequences when we go to build something or do something.

And at the same time, have it be nimble enough that things actually get done.

One issue that's increasingly dividing both parties is the war in Gaza.

More than half of Senate Democrats just voted to oppose the sale of over half a billion dollars worth of U.S.

bombs and guns to Israel.

A lot of them are longtime supporters of Israel.

Would you have voted to oppose sending those weapons?

I think we need to insist that if American taxpayer funding is going to weaponry that is going to Israel, that that is not going to things that shock the conscience.

And look, we see images every day that shock the conscience.

So much of this is complicated, but what's not complicated is that if a child is starving because of a choice made by a government,

that is unconscionable.

And we, I think especially including voices who care about Israel, who believe in Israel's right to exist, who have stood with Israel in response to the unbelievable cruelty and terrorism of October 7th, I think there's a reason why so many of those voices are speaking up now, too, because this is not just something that is on its face and in itself a moral catastrophe.

It is also a catastrophe for Israel for the long run.

How do you think the next administration should handle our relationship with Israel?

Do you think it should change based on what Netanyahu has done the last several years?

Well, certainly Netanyahu can't be the only voice or kind of the only compass for what should happen in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

And, you know, no matter how strongly,

or especially because of how strongly you might believe in Israel's right to exist and defend itself, you don't have to make excuses for the choices that Netanyahu is making, especially because they are often made not only in the name of the Israeli people, but in the name of a U.S.

alliance.

I think that we, as Israel's strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there's something like this going on and talk about what we're prepared to do together.

And it cannot be, certainly cannot be what we see right now from this administration and this president talking about beachfront property in Gaza before he's prepared to talk about human suffering in Gaza.

Do you think it's time to recognize a Palestinian state?

I think that

that's a profound question that arouses a lot of the biggest problems that have happened with

Israel's survival, Israel's right to survival in the diplomatic scene.

And many of the people who have taken that step historically

have done so for different reasons than what we see happening with European countries.

I think we need to step back and we need to do whatever it takes to ensure that there is a real two-state solution and that no one, not even the likes of Netanyahu, can veto the international community's commitment to a two-state solution where you have Palestinians and Israelis living with safety, with security, with rights.

I believe that can happen, but we have to actually show some commitment to it.

We were talking earlier about our kids.

On one hand, I feel like having kids has made me more committed to politics because of the very cliched but true reason that I want to leave them a better country than this.

On the other, it's also made me wonder about the time and emotional energy I'm spending on politics in the Trump era that perhaps I could be spending on them.

Is that something you think about?

How has being a father sort of changed your, in this time period, changed your view about politics or has it?

I think it's really good for you to spend time, especially if you're as involved in politics as you and I are.

I think it's really good for you to spend time with somebody who doesn't think or care about it.

And, you know, there's no more kind of beautiful,

innocent version of that than a three or four year old.

But then it also makes me think more about politics in some ways, because I know that, you know, there are these people now who are the most important people in my life who are going to witness the 22nd century.

And

everything about what that moment will be like, or for that matter, a moment much sooner in the middle of this century where I still hope I'm around, but when they're making their way in life as adults, it's really going to depend on a set of questions and decisions we as a country make here in the 2020s.

I can see them asking me what it was like in the 2020s, the same way I asked my parents what it was like in the 60s.

And I want to make sure I have good answers by the time that happens and by the time that moment comes.

But also, it's a beautiful thing just to be able to just to be able to spend time with them and talk about anything but politics.

I mean, the latest has been our son asked about the origin story of Spider-Man.

And then

I told him the origin story as best I remember it from the movie.

And then very predictably, the next 10 minutes were spent answering variations of the question, where are there active radio spiders?

Where can I find an active radio spider?

He clearly intends to find a radioactive spider or an active radio spider, as he calls it, and get bit by one.

And just like talking him through, like trying to redirect that agenda.

Very healthy change of scene from the stuff I think about most of the time when I'm doing my bread and butter politics.

I was going to say, it has made me

think, like our job is communicating clearly to people, persuading people.

And you just realize when you have little kids that just trying to explain abstract concepts, but you're not allowed to explain the abstract concept with another abstract concept or abstract word, it does help you sort of break things down to the basics to try to

communicate with them.

And it makes you think about sort of how we talk in politics, which is often so removed from how most people talk about their lives.

Totally.

I mean, making it make sense to a kid is one of the best ways to make sure something makes sense in the first place.

And a lot of the things we have that don't make sense, like

how can you get more votes and not be the winner,

they don't make sense to a kid because they're indefensible.

And we need to pay more attention to those lessons.

Which one of you, you or Chastin, is the parent who buys the kids too many toys or gives them too many treats or lets them stay up too late.

I'm going to stand with Chastin and blame the grandparents for the toys and the treats.

That's always a safe choice.

I understand that's always a safe choice.

They definitely have a little more free reign there.

We're trying to hold the line on the toys, the stuffies that are proliferating in the bedroom.

But Chastin will say I'm more of a softy.

I'd like to think I hold the line pretty well, but all that goes out the window when the grandparents come into play.

Yeah, that is certainly true in our house as well.

Pete Buttigieg, thanks as always for joining Pod Save America.

This was great and come back again soon.

Thanks for having me.

Good talking to you.

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All right.

John Lovett.

Hi, John.

Hi.

Thanks for joining.

Thanks for being thank, thank, thank you.

I don't know.

Thanks for having you.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, it was you or Dan.

Yeah, it was me.

Thanks for not having Dan.

All right, we

So that was Pete.

You don't even know what Pete said yet.

You haven't heard it yet.

Nope.

I've heard tell.

I've heard tell.

Yeah, I've been trying to summarize.

But we do have some, we thought we'd take some listener questions from the Discord.

Great.

So that you and I could answer a few.

We have a set of questions to start all on the redistricting fight.

FPO World asks, would y'all like to see the gerrymandering redistricting fight expand to all blue states?

Heffalumpish asks, if every state that can do it actually goes ahead and gerrymanders the shit out of their maps, red or blue, who will come out ahead?

There are a lot more totally red statehouses than blue.

If we do get in this race to the bottom, do the Democrats still lose?

And then Pancake Paladin, who had quite a few questions.

Yeah, a lot of questions.

And seems very

agitated.

Yeah, there, yeah.

But thank you for the questions.

She says, don't mean to be a downer, but is this an inflection point?

Does the Democratic Party have a future if it can't agree this could be existential?

Meaning the redistricting fight.

Cards on the table.

I think when we're in an ad hoc gerrymandering race to the bottom outside of usual census calibrations, leadership should be breaking glass in case of emergency.

Where do you want to begin?

So let's, I want to start with the middle question, which is what would happen if all the Democrats did this everywhere, all the Republicans did this anywhere, who comes out ahead.

Republicans come out ahead.

Yeah.

That's for two reasons.

One, they just control more legislatures and they have more governorships.

We are behind.

Even if we did this in every blue state, they could do this in more places.

They're already planning to do it in a lot of states.

There's plans now in Missouri, Ohio, other states.

There's another reason, and it has actually nothing to do with who's in power or not.

It's a little bit easier for Republicans to gerrymander than Democrats because Democrats are more concentrated.

They're just more parts of the country have districts that are very Republican, but not as Democrat as the Democratic districts are Democrat.

The centers of cities and places like that were just really concentrated.

So it just makes the job of Democrats to do the kind of gerrymandering Republicans do a little bit more difficult, if not impossible, in certain places.

So the question is just, are we going to fight as hard as we can to have as small a disadvantage as we can or not?

Yeah, I saw somewhere, a couple people were doing different calculations on this, that I think if everyone who could decided to gerrymander to the extreme, it would end up being like net four to five seats for Republicans.

And that's if, you know, Democrats and other states that haven't even been spoken about yet.

And Republicans too did this.

But you're right.

It's like, it's just, it's going to end up, we would probably be down a few seats at the end of this.

Yeah.

And now the good news there is down a surmountable number of seats, right?

Like they can gain four more seats.

They already have a very slim majority.

We can overcome it in two ways.

One way is just by winning in more places.

The other is because

there is, I think sometimes in these fights, we lose sight of some of the

kind of natural breaks that exist, even if Republicans are the worst people on planet Earth.

And one of the natural breaks is, in order to gerrymander really hard, you have to take Republican votes away from Republican members of Congress.

Like that is part of what happens.

In order to make, to turn a bunch of Democratic districts into Republican districts, you have to put Republicans in those places.

Where do they come from?

The Republican districts that already exist.

And so you'll start to see, it may not be public, it may not be as loud, but you will see kind of pressure that comes in closed doors with just Republicans that puts a little bit of a break on just how far they can go.

And I saw some other questions floating around in Discord and about,

you know, like, why is Gavin Newsom and California only thinking about netting five to neutralize Texas?

Why not more?

The challenge becomes, and Republicans face this challenge too, which is drawing the actual maps so that you can have districts where somehow you get all Republican districts or all Democratic districts and zero of the other side.

And that's just, especially with the bigger the state, that's really hard to do.

It is probably impossible to draw the maps in California so that you, California, which has, you know,

five million Republicans that voted in the last election, it's hard to draw them all into one or no district.

It's just like a hard thing to do.

It's hard.

Like, it involves computers doing their best to pump out insane looking shapes that are still continuous.

But rest assured that people have thought about this.

Of course, of course.

But again, this is the other side of it.

In order to really do it, you're going to take some districts that are currently held by a Democrat and you're going to make them a little harder to keep in a year where the election doesn't go their way.

That's by the way, part of all of this, which is

If Republicans gerrymander too hard, they can accidentally talk themselves out of some seats.

And just one other point about this, too.

Like, it is true that what Republicans are doing are taking this very far.

But, like, Republicans have done

mid-year redistricting in the past.

North Carolina has done it.

Texas has done it.

There's been a fight like this before.

I do think this is a more brazen version of it, but like we've...

we've fought back and won against these kinds of tactics too.

To Pancake Paladin's question, does the Democratic Party have a future if it can't agree this could be existential?

I just

I want to take that question for a few reasons.

The Democratic Party, of course, has a future.

It's basically the only vessel we have right now in this country to defeat rising authoritarianism.

This is not a third-party country, and so you can hate the Democratic Party, and we've got some problems with it, but the only solution is to change the Democratic Party for the better.

I think it's a bit of a straw man because I don't know who's not worried about this in the Democratic Party.

Like I said, I think the first time we talked about this, there was like a few progressives in the California State Assembly who were like, no, this is bad.

We can't be like them.

And we believe in independent redistricting and all that stuff.

But I would say just about every 2028 candidate, most of the House, most of the Senate leadership, all seems like they are all in for this fight.

And then lastly, on the existential thing, I don't think it's quite as existential as we might suspect because...

Again, if we go the same route they do, which is what's going to happen, it is a race to the bottom where we probably are down a couple seats.

But I think the challenge is you go down this road and suddenly you just stop having competitive house elections, really.

And then House general elections.

And then what happens is the only game in town is the primaries for house seats.

And primaries favor just more extreme candidates on both sides.

And so I think you just get in, I think

if the whole house map is suddenly gerrymandered and we're not having competitive house elections anymore, first of all, you're not going to get new politicians.

You're not going to get new young leaders who are exciting.

You're going to get the same people who are just stuck in their seats and it's not competitive.

And that is just bad for politics.

It's probably bad for us too, for Democrats, but it's just bad.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

And it just, another reason it's bad is redistricting fights are messy and divisive and

time-occupying.

Like every legislature in the country that's debating a map is not figuring out how they're going to fund the schools or the roads or solving any problem that anyone is dealing with anywhere.

And what they're introducing is the possibilities that redistricting is going to happen all the time.

No, it's not illegal, but it just is another way in which they're striking at the

forbearance that has helped our system work.

And to take the pancakes question,

generously, you're right.

Democratic states like Colorado and California have independent redistricting while Republicans have become more brazen.

We've paid a price for that.

Newsom creating a plan, moving it fast, potentially getting on the ballot this November.

Hochel saying the right thing is very difficult in New York because it'd have to be a constitutional amendment, but she's saying the right things.

Like a lot of these organizations that were in favor of independent redistricting suddenly deciding that at least while they may believe that in the long term for now we have to fight, like that tells you that people are moving.

The Democratic Party is a collection of people.

They are tending to say the right thing.

Stephen R.

Martin asks, should Stephen Colbert challenge Senator Lindsey Graham for the Senate seat?

Sure.

I think no, because South Carolina, I think, is too difficult.

Oh, yeah.

But I loved.

I would like Stephen Colbert to maybe run for president.

I don't think it's crazy.

I don't think so.

I mean, we're always looking for someone who's got name ID and everyone knows, and they're also sort of outside the world of politics, but also no politics, and is also one of the better humans in public life, Stephen Colbert is.

So I don't know.

He's run for something.

South Carolina is just a tough state.

Yeah, South Carolina.

If it was North Carolina, I'd say go for it in a second.

I just would like to see that race.

I think it would be fun to watch.

It would be very fun.

Yeah, like I'm, I want to, I'm excited to see what Colbert does next.

He testified before Congress a bunch of years ago, and he talked, I believe it might have been about immigration.

I honestly, now I'm not remembering the topic, but what I remember from it is he had a very poignant moment about his faith and his values.

And whenever he leaves behind that kind of artifice of the show and just talks about like what drives him He's a beautiful speaker and thinker and so I am just excited to see what he does after this me too me too Jacob I I had we I had to really do some digging for this question because it just it it comes in through halfway through the sentence it just says Obama's dig on ketchup being only for kids under the age of eight and I was like what the fuck is that

And I had no idea and then you came in this morning and I saw it was from Michelle's podcast And Obama went on Michelle's podcast.

And he made a crack about how, at a certain age, you should not be having ketchup anymore.

I'll tell you what a sicko I am, is I hadn't seen the clip.

That's just a view I knew Obama had from previous interviews where he's made

honestly less extreme versions of this point.

His politics against ketchup have radicalized, but he's talked about ketchup in the past in a very negative way.

Also, Jacob asks, was that an attempt at a sneak attack on the ketchupper-in-chief Trump?

No, I don't.

No, I'm fairly certain that it was not.

Hey, listen, man, Jacob, that red string, there's a lot of places to put it these days, places it belongs.

Justice Department to the White House, White House to a cushy club-fed prison in Texas, that prison down to Florida, all of it, totally valid.

I do not think Barack Obama is doing 3D chess on ketchup politics.

I think he just has an opinion about the sauce.

Follow-up from Jacob.

What is the appropriate age to stop using ketchup?

I disagree with our old boss on this one.

I think ketchup is fine to use your whole life if you like ketchup.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with ketchup.

I don't think you need to yuck other people's yum.

I'm not like a huge fan of ketchup.

I'll dip a couple fries in it every now and then and I'll put it on a burger.

I actually don't like ketchup that much, to be honest.

I don't have a problem with other people having it having it.

I sometimes think this is because ketchup is all the flavors.

It's salty.

It's sweet.

It's sour.

It's umami

and it's a little bitter honestly But I think the sweetness is why people like think it's a kid's thing because, like, mustard is such an adult set of flavors, you know, and ketchup is very sweet.

And so it's a kind of way of making your hot dog a little bit like dessert.

So I understand where he's coming from.

I don't like it that much.

I always just paired it with mustard growing up.

It was always mustard and ketchup and mustard on my burger, ketchup and mustard on my hot dog.

I'll tell you what I do.

That's, I think

I don't think other people do, which is when I go through McDonald's drive-through for my secret burgers,

your secret burgers.

Yeah, they're just, that just, they're just between me, McDonald's, and God.

Nobody knows about those burgers.

They're secret burgers.

When I have a secret burger, I usually get either a double cheeseburger or a McDouble.

No ketchup, no mustard.

Dry.

Just pickles and onions.

Dry.

Yeah.

That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

It lets the meat speak.

I don't know if the meat needs to speak.

Does anyone need to hear the meat?

The meat is drowning in a cacophony of ketchup and mustard.

It speaks softly, but it should be heard.

I let the meat speak.

Yeah, I'm more likely to let the meat speak when it's like

a burger that you cook on a grill at home.

You know, McDonald's, I feel like it needs the accoutrements.

Okay.

And that's what makes this country great.

It does.

It does.

If Barack Obama can hate ketchup, we can love it.

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Jams asks, can the Democratic Party continue to push working-class policies, minimum wage increases, free school lunches, defending Medicaid, as its base becomes wealthier?

And if not, which one wins out, the platform or the voters?

There's an old joke about how when Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average income becomes billions.

The problem isn't that the Democratic base got wealthier.

The problem is that the Democratic base got smaller

and left behind a bunch of wealthy people.

It's not the people we have, it's the people we lost.

The trade has not been even.

Right.

And it's not just wealthier.

It's really the line is college education.

Now, obviously, people with college degree tend to be wealthier, but that's not true in all cases by any means.

But yeah, no, if we don't have a party, if the base of our party is college educated, we lose.

We lose all the time, all different elections, presidential, senate, house, we're fucked.

That's right.

And so the idea that we can go on our merry way just losing non-college educated voters,

whether they, I mean, first we lost a lot of white non-college educated voters, then now Latinos, also some black men.

So we are, we just can't lose non-college voters.

And so the platform has to win out here.

And we have to to figure out a way to bring back people who don't have a college degree and who aren't as wealthy 100%.

There's just no option.

There's no winning unless we don't want to win.

And I think some people don't, actually.

Or like it's secondary to some other concerns that they have, which I understand.

That's again.

And I'm not saying that's what Jams was saying at all.

No, and Jams, we're not saying that about you.

This is not you, Jams.

Jams probably, for all we know, Jams wants the platform to win, not the voters.

Yeah.

In fact, maybe

I would guess that.

That's where I took Jams' point from.

Me too.

Me too.

Let's see.

Super's kink.

Super's kink.

Super's kink asks, how can we convince Dems to actually go all out to fix the country?

Like, I want Project 2025 on steroids, Dem Edition, and Heffalumpish coming in twice here.

Is anyone working on Project 2029 for the Democrats?

If so, who are they?

Who's choosing them?

How can ordinary Democrats have input?

And if that's not happening, do you have a good location for a void I can scream into?

Oh, there's great voids all over the place to scream.

You can find a great place to scream all over this country.

It's a big, a lot of it's empty, honestly.

So there are a lot of different people thinking about what a Democratic Project 2029 would look like.

I feel like there's going to be versions that are like more in the Bernie wing, and then there's going to be the kind of antitrust wing.

There's the abundance wing, there's the neolib shill wing.

I mean, that's what a primary is for.

It's a big fractious debate that helps the party come together around a set of policy goals, right?

Yeah, I sort of took that question to mean not just the policies, but

I feel like what Project 2025 did well is there was a bunch of policies that they had wanted to implement for a while.

And Project 2025 was focused on how do we actually get this stuff done?

It's like all the norms, everything that's not bolted down, which is by law, and some stuff that is bolted down by law, we're going to take, right?

We're going to get ready.

All the norms are gone.

All the rules are gone.

Anything that was tradition that people didn't do, like, you know, the Justice Department used to put it at arm's length and it was independent.

And now, you know, fuck it.

We could do a lot more if the Justice Department just wasn't independent.

I almost feel like it's that.

Like, at least that, that's what I've been thinking is, what are the places where we can amass power?

And what places should we amass power?

And what places should we go back to sort of the independence of the FCC or the Justice Department, et cetera?

I actually asked Pete this question because Pete was like, we have to, you know, figure out how to actually deliver for people.

And I was like, well, do you think we should go back to,

Independent Justice Department?

And he said, oh, yes, of course.

But I do think that's going to be, I think all of those questions are pretty challenging for Democrats to answer ahead of 2028 and next time we take power, if that should happen.

Yeah.

And if we take it and then someone takes it back before we have a chance to use it.

Like Trump created like a unique opportunity for the right-wing think tank types because what they realized is they had basically an empty vessel, right?

And

they knew that if they that all they'd have to do is do the work, because Trump would never do the work.

And if they did the work and they had the people, they could be put in place by Trump, who really just wants some headlines and it's a few core issues that he'd be driving and that Stephen Miller would be driving.

But otherwise, they could kind of have the run of the place, which is what's happened.

And Project 2025, yeah,

they won, I don't think because of Project 2025, they won despite Project 2025 because they put together a set of extreme and deeply unpopular policies.

Yeah, no, that's a good, it's a good point because their problem is that too many people found out about Project 225.

And what they were lucky about is that not enough in time.

That's right.

Because it was extremely unpopular.

And or didn't believe it, right?

But most people did.

Yeah, people either didn't believe it or didn't hear about it.

Right.

Or Trump denied it, right?

Pretended it wasn't true.

So the challenge for Democrats is

whoever we nominate is going to have a bunch of ideological commitments, right, that not everybody's going to agree with, right?

And there's going to be debates about what we should pursue and what we shouldn't, what policies are right but unpopular, what policies are popular but that don't go far enough.

There's like a whole range of big questions we're going to have to answer.

We're going to do that in front of people, unlike what they did at first with Project 2025.

So I don't know if we need to answer Project 2025 with Project 2029 exactly, but what I do think is what Trump should teach us is that Democrats for a long time were a little bit,

we lacked the imagination imagination for just how quickly politics could change and I do think like the spirit of that what what I take from the spirit of that question is are we going to be willing to really push the bounds of democratic politics or for what we're willing to propose to people and I think we should and I think we like need to be open to like big and different ideas and and that to me makes me actually excited about what a primary could look like and I think that

The ideological spectrum is not the only place to have debates about these policies.

I think sort of that's what happened in 2020.

It was, well, we lost in 2016 and Democrats were too incremental in their policies.

And so now we need to be big and bold and ambitious, which ended up being like spend more money,

larger government, whatever it may have been.

And I think that

we need to think creatively about power.

Yeah.

You know, and how to make sure that when we propose something, be it very progressive, center left, somewhere in the middle, we get it done.

Because I think there is a danger in over-promising and telling people that we can do something that we cannot do.

And then there is a danger in going too small, right?

But like we got to figure out new ways to sort of use the power that we're given to actually improve people's lives in a way that they remember when they go to the ballot box.

Yeah, it's why this question, I think, is it's hard for candidates to answer in the abstract right now, even for someone like Pete, because I think part of why it's like, well, obviously the department who does this should be independent, but, you know, how much control should we have over the FCC?

What kind of executive orders are legal or not?

It actually,

like the Republicans over decades, developed a pretty clear theory, which is we can do whatever the fuck we want, as long as the Supreme Court says it's okay.

All power flows from the president.

Everything else is either up for debate or unconstitutional.

And we have a limited time to act, and we have to push back this sort of liberal kind of bureaucracy that is sort of swallowing the economy and has so much power that it never really was given, et cetera, et cetera.

Like, I don't know what Democrats think about power.

I really don't, like, how we're meant to use it, what rules we believe in.

I don't really totally understand what our judicial philosophy is, right?

Like, I know we think that abortion should be legal.

I know what the ends should be, but I have no idea what the, like, our version of originalism is, right?

Our version of unitary executive theory is.

Like, I just, I don't know.

Yeah.

Well, and to answer the question, I don't, there's a bunch of different people working on it, different parts, but there's no like one effort anywhere.

And I believe ordinary Democrats will be able to have input as candidates announce for 2028 and there are debates and they lay out policy platforms.

And that's probably going to be the place to have the input.

Yeah.

Last question comes from Will O.

According to the Project 2025 tracker, the administration has nearly implemented 50% of the plan in just over six months.

And while their approval ratings are at all-time lows, it just doesn't seem like anything is sticking to get people motivated to stay on top of holding the administration accountable.

What's it going to take to get, and most importantly, keep people motivated, involved for the long haul uh pick this question because you know dan and i talked about it on friday's pod i have been struggling with it wondering about it i'm i don't know what you think like it's it's a really tough question

yeah and i also by the way like i think sometimes this question really means like i'm really nervous and it things are so bad and yet it doesn't feel like

like the polls the way politics feels doesn't reflect how bad things actually are.

Well, that's been true ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator, right?

Just is the nature of our politics right now because of the fractured nature of the media, because of the country's distaste for Democrats and the kind of tarnishing the Democratic brand, which we're crawling back from.

And I don't think anybody has a great answer.

But that being said, like what should we be doing right now to make sure we're in a position to win the midterms?

Or maybe a better way of saying it, is there anything we should be doing right now that we're not doing to put ourselves in a position to win the midterms?

I don't know.

But I think we're doing a lot.

I think we're making really good arguments.

Donald Trump is losing in popularity.

Mike Flood is getting the shit kicked out of him at a town hall.

Republicans are struggling and divided over Epstein of all things.

Like they're on their heels.

Donald Trump is going to the roof of the White House.

He's talking about ballrooms, putting nuclear fucking reactors on the moon.

Like he's making fun of Sidney Sweeney.

Or no, he's loving Sidney Sweeney, but he's making fun of Taylor Swift.

Like he's trying everything.

Reality's catching up with them a little bit.

And the question is, how do we make the most of it?

Yeah.

I think, and, you know, I said this Friday, but

there has been some just incredible work being done by organizers and activists on the ground.

And we've seen a lot of the No Kings marches and we've seen a lot of this, you know, the resistance is, it's back.

It might not be getting as much coverage because the media is broken, but it's back.

And I think we need to just grow the movement, right?

I think that there is, like, those of us who have been,

who've been in the salt mines, the content mines,

since, since Trump won, it's like, you know,

it's one big group of a lot of committed people.

Like, next time you go to an organizing event or a rally, bring someone who has never been before.

Yeah.

You know, I did like a friend who's maybe talking about politics once in a while, maybe turned away because they were like, oh, I can't, I just can't look at the news anymore.

It's Donald Trump being crazy every day.

It's awful.

You know,

convince like one person to come with you to a rally or to a town hall or to an organizing event.

You know, I think that's the, I think growing the movement ahead of the midterms and ultimately 2028 is probably going to be the most important thing we can do.

Yeah, I think that's right.

All right.

Thank you all for your questions.

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And thanks again to Pete Buttigieg for joining Pod Save America.

And we always loved talking about having you.

Can't believe I said that about Sidney Sweeney.

That's crazy.

It's wild.

Actually, like a unique take.

A unique take.

Yeah, strange.

I didn't expect that coming from him.

Strange.

Yeah.

And the Epstein theory he has.

Yes.

That's weird.

That's so weird.

Yeah, that's weird.

That's so weird.

And what he showed you on his phone about it.

Yeah, that's.

Held it up.

weird stuff wow come back pete please

bye everyone

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