Pete Buttigieg warns democrats can't go back to pre-Trump status quo

0:01Pete Buttigieg contends President Trump is destroying American institutions. Which is wrong. It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was. How would he have Democrats change their approach? I'm Steve Inskeep, and this is a special edition of Up First from NPR News. We had an extended talk with the former Transportation Secretary and presidential candidate. His party looks for a reset and presses President Trump on Jeffrey Epstein. You shouldn't have to be a Republican or a Democrat to care about making sure there's transparency on something as horrific as the abuses that happened.

0:41Also, he's one of several possible presidential contenders with a beard. If you were to run, would you shave it? That's a double hypothetical. Stay with us. We'll have a talk with a man once known as Mayor Pete. This message comes from NPR sponsor FX. Presenting The Lowdown, starring Ethan Hawke. introducing you to Lee Raybon, a quirky journalist slash rare bookstore owner slash unofficial truth seeker who is always on the tail of his latest conspiracy. This time, his most recent expose puts him head to head with a powerful family that rules Tulsa, meaning only one thing. He must be on to something big.

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2:05Odoo, exactly what a business needs. Sign up at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Democrats are debating their future, and here is one of the voices in that debate. My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me Mayor Pete. That's the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, when he declared his run for president a couple of campaigns ago. He stepped aside in favor of Joe Biden, became Biden's transportation secretary, and was notable as one of the Democrats who took up the challenge of talking on Fox News. Sorry, is this an interview or a debate? Can I at least finish the sentence? Well, I just can't let you throw out fallacies.

2:41It's important. Excuse me? Name one statement that I just made that you would say is factually inaccurate. Now his party is out of power. Buttigieg has moved from Indiana to Michigan for personal reasons, he has said, although it is a presidential swing state. We met face-to-face in New York City for an NPR video interview. The conversation started late. As he crossed the city to our studios, people kept stopping him to ask for selfies. I saw this myself as I let him into and back out of the building. This was all last week as President Trump and his allies were trying to fend off Trump's own supporters.

3:15They are demanding that the government release more information about Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier convicted of sex offenses and connected to many of the rich and powerful, including, in the past, Donald Trump. And that was where our conversation began. As we're talking, the House of Representatives has stepped aside for a number of weeks rather than address this issue. What do you think the public interest in that particular topic tells you about President Trump, about voters, about America right now? Well, I think the public interest just got a lot deeper because one of our branches of government, the U.S.

3:51House of Representatives, has been shut down because the Republicans would rather close that half of the Congress than allow the Epstein files to come out or somehow impede President Trump's decision to block those files. So I think what that tells you is, first of all, obviously something very sensitive for President Trump. But also I think it speaks more broadly to this pattern of events where the president has said he would do something when it suited him to say he would do it. And then when it's his interest to do the reverse, he'll do that, right? He said he was going to cut prices on day one.

4:26He did the reverse. He said he was going to bring peace to the Middle East on day one, bring peace to Russia and Ukraine on day one. And he said that he was going to release these files right away. And now it's more in his interest to block them. So he's blocking them. I guess we should note that Republicans say they shut down the House because they believe your party is cynically trying to exploit this issue that you don't actually care about. Is it true that you don't actually care about it? Well, I think that every American now has a stake in this, if only because the Republicans would rather shut down the entire U.S.

4:55House of Representatives than have to vote on allowing these files to come to light. So, yeah, I think it's safe to say this was historically more of an area of interest for the MAGA base and conservatives. But you shouldn't have to be a Republican or a Democrat to care about making sure there's transparency on something as horrific as the abuses that happened and to want to understand why an administration that promised to shed light on this decided not to. There's never been any real explanation of that. I want to look at this in a little deeper sense as to what it says about the public, about people who are interested in this.

5:33I'm imagining that you would rather be talking about infrastructure or talking about economic fairness or affordability or something like that. This seems to be the thing that has captured the attention a lot of the public. And according to surveys, a lot of people simply do not believe they've been told the truth about that. What does that public skepticism tell you more broadly about where voters are right now? Well, I think it's a touchstone that reflects something much bigger about people feeling that their government isn't telling them the truth. And it's easy to see why frustration about that has reached a boiling point in this country.

6:08But look, we've got a broader issue of a breakdown, a collapse really in societal trust. This has been going on for years. I wrote a whole book about this five years ago, and I think it's even more important now. And unless there is a higher degree of fidelity between our institutions, our leaders, and the people they serve, then issue after issue will become volcanic as this has. And it's just not sustainable. On that matter of trust, somebody listening to this is going to say, well, Biden didn't release the Epstein file when he had the chance. Yeah, he also didn't campaign promising that he would.

6:45I don't know how decisions were made in DOJ. That was different from my world. But what I know is that Donald Trump made a big deal about this, promised to bring this to light right away. And now he's blocking it. There are also Republicans alleging that you and others in the administration did not say all you knew about President Biden's condition. How his age has affected him over time? That's not true. In my case, at least I told the truth, which is that he was old. You could see that he was old. And also when it came to my ability to do my job and have my boss, my president, support me in that job, I always got whatever I needed from him, from the Oval Office.

7:21You never had a moment before that famous presidential debate where you worried about whether he was all there? There were moments where I thought, he's looking tired today, or where I noticed that he was aging. But there was never a moment where I thought this decision, this policy or this process is going worse or is wrong because of the fact that he's old. Let me put a proposition on the table and we'll see if you agree with it or not. I think it's possible to say, looking at the last election, looking at the last several years, that the country has changed, that politics have changed, that Republicans figured that out and captured the moment, and Democrats have failed to do so up to now.

8:02Do you agree with that? I would mostly agree. Yeah. I think that Democrats have been slow to understand the changes in how people get their information, slow to understand some of the cultural changes that have been happening. and maybe most problematic of all, too attached to a status quo that has been failing us for a long time. Right now, you've got an administration that is burning down so many of the most important institutions that we have in this country, which is wrong. It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was. And I think that my party needs to do a better job of addressing the fundamental problems that have led people to mistrust everything.

8:49But we are already in a dramatically different world than we were six months ago, let alone four years ago. And that's about to change that much more, in my opinion, because of the rise of artificial intelligence. And I think even now, even though it's a hot topic and people are discussing it all the time, there's a lot of hype. I think even now we are underreacting in a big way, politically and substantively to what this is about to do to us as a country. Artificial intelligence, you mean. What do you mean? What's the danger? Well, in addition to the dangers that do get talked about a lot, the kind of apocalyptic scenarios of runaway robots and machines, which nobody has a job.

9:26Yeah. The economic implications are the ones that I think could be the most disruptive, the most quickly. We're talking about whole categories of jobs where not in 30 or 40 years, but in three or four, half of the entry-level jobs might not be there. And if that happens as quickly as it might happen, it'll be a bit like what I lived through as a kid in the industrial Midwest when trade and automation sucked away a lot of the auto jobs in the 90s, but 10 times, maybe 100 times more disruptive because it's happening on a more widespread basis and it's happening more quickly. And you don't think that we're really reacting to that?

10:04We talk about it, but we're not doing anything. I don't think we're asking big enough questions about what we would do if that many jobs got disrupted. We're talking about changes that might be bigger and faster than anything we've seen since the 17th century, the Industrial Revolution, which is before the United States existed. And yeah, I think we're underreacting to that. You talked about the status quo and Democrats getting stuck defending the status quo. One of your fellow Democrats, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, has talked a lot about this recently. And I can summarize his argument by saying Democrats need to be more populist.

10:39We need to acknowledge that people are profoundly dissatisfied with the status quo. We also, as Democrats, he would say, need to be tearing things down, need to be talking about the very few people who seem to be benefiting in this situation. He also wants Democrats to be louder, a little more disruptive in government. What do you make of his approach? I think it's certainly true that we can't be wedded to the old ways or the status quo. It is wrong to burn down the Department of Education. But I actually think it's also wrong to suppose that the Department of Education was just right in 2024.

11:14You could say the same thing about USAID. It is unconscionable that children were left to die by the abrupt destruction of USAID. Unconscionable. It is also clear that USAID developed into something that nobody on a clean sheet would have designed the way it was. There were a lot of problems with development aid and how it was structured. My point is, it's wrong to burn these things down. But it's also wrong to suppose that if Democrats come back to power, our project should be to just tape the pieces together just the way that they were. We should be unsentimental about the things that don't work.

11:52We should be fearless in defending the things that do work. And yes, we should be naming the forces, entities, people, often corporations, who stand between a lot of Americans in a better, freer life. There's a particular small slice of that that I worked on when I was in transportation as, for example, a tough regulator of airlines trying to make sure that they treat their passengers better. But across our entire society and economy, we could be doing better on that because this president has come to power promising to do that. Now, what he's actually doing is exactly the reverse, a tax bill that makes it easier for the wealthiest and corporations and harder for the working class that he claims he represents.

12:33but they're talking a good game. And we need to be much more responsive to that. What is the cultural change in America that you said you felt Democrats had missed? Well, I think there's a perception that Democrats became so focused on identity that we no longer had a message that could actually speak to people across the board, or that we were only for you if you fit into a certain identity bucket. And the tragedy of that is that I believe the right kind of democratic vision is one that lifts everybody up. It pays specific attention to discrimination or mistreatment of people because they're black or because they're women or LGBTQ or whatever reason that might be.

13:20But you don't have to be in this particular combination of categories to benefit from what we have to offer. And I think we really struggled to communicate something a bit more universal. And that's been costly. Pete Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary and former presidential candidate. Coming up, how does he respond to some of the other critiques of the Democratic Party?

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14:33Get a new Dell PC at dell.com slash ai dash pc. This message comes from Michelin. More than a tire company, Michelin is an innovation company. Now taking on space, developing an airless wheel for space exploration. Motion for life. More at michelinman.com slash y hyphen Michelin slash innovation. Their defeat to President Trump has prompted Democrats to challenge some of their party's strategies. And that was part of our discussion with Pete Buttigieg. Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff and holder of other significant positions as a Democrat, gave an interview to Megyn Kelly just the other day, and she asked a series of questions about trans people.

15:20He ended up contradicting most Democratic Party orthodoxy about trans people, ended up by saying, agreeing with the idea that a man cannot become a woman, and then said he was going to head for the witness protection program because he was aware that some Democrats would be unhappy. What's your approach to that, and how would you try to appeal to people who disagree with you about it? I think the approach starts with compassion, compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them.

15:57Like wondering, wait a minute, I got a daughter in the sports league. Is she going to be competing with boys right now? And just taking everybody seriously. And I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party. For example, around sports, where I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women's sports. Meaning the parent who's complained about this has a case, in your opinion. Sure. And that's why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington, trying to use this as a political pawn.

16:42when President Trump says something like no boys and girls sports, which is a phrase that they use. It sounds like you're not signing on to that. I think that chess is different from weightlifting and weightlifting is different from volleyball. And, you know, middle school is different from the Olympics. So that's exactly why I think that we shouldn't be grandstanding on this as politicians. We should be empowering communities and organizations and schools to make the right decisions. Let me ask about another argument that's been made about the Democratic Party and where it ought to go. Let's call it the Ezra Klein-Derek Thompson school.

17:16There are a number of books, theirs is maybe the most famous one, that argues that government isn't working, isn't delivering for people, and a large reason is because of the way that progressives have approached government, burdening people who want to build things with too many regulations, too many opportunities to stop something, nimbyism. As somebody who was a transportation secretary, you may be familiar with this argument. Maybe you were familiar with it before. What do you make of it? I lived it. Look, it is too hard to build things in this country. Definitely my experience with transportation is that it is too expensive, too complicated, too lengthy to get things done.

17:55And that's also true for a number of things that matter enormously to the fight against climate change, or I'd say the fight to slow climate change. The need to build more clean power transmission and generation just to take a couple of issue sets. So I think that they pointed to a number of things that are inarguably consistent with what I experienced. At the same time, I think it would be a mistake to suppose that that's all you have to do, that there's a set of burdensome regulations and if you just got rid of them, everything would go along just fine. It does not relieve us of other things that need to happen in terms of adequately funding clean energy, transportation, housing, the other things that we need to build.

18:39And recognizing where the issue has more to do with industry structure, especially, again, I think back to transportation where there's a lot of monopolies or oligopolies. railroads, airlines. How much of a disaster from your point of view is the administration creating by canceling so many projects in the middle, by ending subsidies for clean energy, on and on? I think it's hugely costly. I think it will destroy jobs. I think it's going to lead to, we already know it's leading to higher costs of living. You know, health insurance premiums are coming out for next year. They're higher because of the Trump budget.

19:14Prices obviously are higher. I think that's partly because of the Trump administration's policies. Interest rates are going to be higher because of how much they've added to the national debt to make room for these tax cuts for the wealthiest. Jobs, I mean, take where I grew up, South Bend. One of the biggest things to happen, in fact, the biggest thing to happen in terms of a new auto industry investment since the 1960s when Studebaker stopped making cars is a facility going in in St. Joe County to create electric vehicle batteries. It was even just building it, even before it opens, has employed members of the building and construction trades in that part of Indiana where I grew up at a level not seen, I think, in my lifetime.

19:56Now the fate of that project and so many like it have been called into question in ways that are going to hurt our economy and, of course, also set us back in terms of dealing with climate change. Have we surrendered to China when it comes to clean energy, electric vehicles, wind, solar, the whole bit? The Trump administration is surrendering to China right and left from pulling out of UNESCO so that China can exert more cultural control over how the world relates to its own heritage to very specific dollars and cents economic things. And I think the tragedy of that is China is trying to corner the market on green and clean tech for a strategic reason.

20:31I do not think that the Chinese Communist Party is sentimental about climate change. I think they just recognize that this is a way to dominate the economy of the future. If you give those markets up to them, as Trump seems determined to do, the result is they will win. I want to remind people that we're talking in New York City, where the Democratic candidate for mayor, the nominee for mayor is Zohran Mamdani. What do you make of him? I think that what he achieved is extraordinary. And a big part of how he did it was by relentlessly focusing on affordability. No matter what the context, the topic, the news of the day, he went straight to the thing that was on New Yorkers' minds, which is how hard it is to afford anything, rent, groceries, you name it.

21:20I think that he also, just as a matter of campaign strategy, was omnipresent. He was everywhere. He was going on podcasts. He was doing social media. And so I think a lot of more conventional political operatives didn't see him coming. Andrew Cuomo had a more conventional media campaign. For sure. And I think in many ways, in addition to the moral disqualifications that went with his history, he just didn't – if anything, he reminded, I think, a lot of people of the status quo. So I think a lot of people are focused on the leftism, the ideological leftism that I think we shouldn't be so surprised that prevailed in a New York Democratic Party primary.

22:03But I think if my party wants to learn lessons from Mamdani's success that are portable to a place like Michigan where I live, it's less about the ideology and more about the message discipline of focusing on what people care about and the tactical wisdom of getting out there and talking to everybody. I was talking the other day to a Democratic member of Congress representing part of New York City who said to me, essentially what you're saying, Mom Donnie in many ways is the future. He knew how to campaign. He's doing everything right. There's a lot to learn from him. And this lawmaker said, I haven't endorsed him yet because I have a lot of Orthodox Jews in my district.

22:44What do you make of that contradiction? Yeah, I mean, again, it's kind of distinguishing between tactics and ideology. And I would say he's further left than I am. But also I think that what he's been able to do is something that our party ought to learn from. Would you endorse him? Say Big Ten approach. I don't agree with him about everything, but I endorse him. He hasn't asked me to endorse. I'm not really a player in New York City municipal politics. Hypothetically, let's say that he asked. I would talk to him about it, sure. You would talk to him about it, meaning you're not sure that you would or wouldn't.

23:14Yeah, I would want to be honest as somebody who follows this from afar but hasn't exactly dug in on it. I haven't kind of dug in on these policy proposals he's put forward and how they would actually work. I'd want to kind of talk through that. I think the most important job, though, of any mayor, and by the way, I also emerged as a very young, some would have said untested, disruptive figure running for mayor, right? The most important job of any mayor is to pull a community together. You are the walking symbol of what all of the diverse, disparate people in your city have in common. And if I get a chance to talk with him, I'll want to talk with him about how he aims to do that.

23:56I've often felt that New York City mayors come to embody their city and that mayors in general come to embody the city in some way if they do the job well. Yeah, which is this amazing thing that happens. I mean, even in my city where I served of South Bend, Indiana, you really do gradually feel like you're sort of becoming the city. You're morphing into it, which means you kind of rise and fall with the city. And sometimes it means you take on board this pain when things are hurting in the city. But it also means you just extend yourself to other people in this beautiful way that I think is one of the reasons why Mayer might be the most important and unique office in American politics.

24:39I want to ask a little bit about his policy proposals. There's been so much discussion on NPR and elsewhere about his identity and what it means. But I wonder what some of his actual proposals mean. I think of a proposal that he has because of affordability. It's impossible to live in New York. He proposes a rent freeze. And when I hear that as a former resident of New York City who lived at one time in a rent-stabilized apartment, I think about the fact that New York has had various forms of rent control and rent stabilizations. So for generations, the government has tried this in various ways.

25:09And still nobody can afford to live here. And it's extremely expensive. And his proposal now is to freeze rents at the level at which people already say they can't afford. Does that make sense? I think there's some very logical questions to ask about both who that helps and what comes next. Because if housing is unaffordable, one of the reasons is there's not enough housing. I mean, that's just a basic clear fact. So what are you doing to make sure that there's more housing as well as making sure people can afford to live? But then, of course, another part of it is there's always the price. When we talk about affordability, there's price and there's income.