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Pete Buttigieg
He warned that the fear of saying the wrong thing has morphed into a hallmark of rising autocracy.
Pete Buttigieg is no longer in the Cabinet or actively campaigning, but this week, the former Transportation secretary stepped back into the national political spotlight with a pair of interviews that touched on LGBTQ+ rights, authoritarianism, and the internal tensions facing the Democratic Party.
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In a new podcast episode of The People’s Cabinet with Dan Koh, Buttigieg offered a warning about political division and disinformation. “We’re divided and afraid at a moment when we can least afford it,” he said.
Buttigieg, the first out gay person confirmed by the Senate to a U.S. Cabinet post, expressed concern that Democrats are alienating voters not through policy, but through tone. “Our party did become the preachy party,” he said. “It’s one thing to stand up for your values… but it’s another to make people feel like they’re bad people because of how they voted or because they didn’t say the right thing in the right way.”
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He said that even people acting in good faith, those who want to be supportive or inclusive, have felt increasingly anxious that one misstep in language could make them targets of social condemnation. That sense of apprehension, he argued, has given way to something more dangerous: widespread institutional fear of political retribution. “You had a whole period where people were looking over their shoulder wondering, ‘Did I say the wrong thing and offend the group?’” Buttigieg said. “Now you’ve got universities, media outlets, law firms, and corporations doing the same thing, but worried they might anger the government instead.” That, he warned, is the defining fear of life under autocracy. “But it’s upon us.”
Those remarks came just one day after Buttigieg drew criticism for comments on transgender student-athletes during an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition. Asked whether a parent concerned about their daughter facing a trans competitor “has a case,” Buttigieg replied, “Sure,” before rejecting top-down bans. “These decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards,” he said, “not politicians in Washington trying to use this as a political pawn.”
Buttigieg declined to embrace President Donald Trump’s slogan “No boys in girls’ sports.”
“Chess is different from weightlifting, and weightlifting is different from volleyball, and middle school is different from the Olympics,” he said. “That’s exactly why I think we shouldn’t be grandstanding on this as politicians.”
The remarks were met with backlash from some transgender people and allies, who viewed them as ambiguous at a time when increasingly aggressive state and federal policies are targeting transgender youth. Others defended his comments as a deliberate rejection of oversimplified framing, and a call to keep trans lives from being reduced to campaign talking points. The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear two cases next term that will decide whether states can ban trans people from participating in athletics.
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On The People’s Cabinet, Buttigieg widened the lens. He accused Trump of using LGBTQ+ people and other vulnerable groups to stir outrage and distract from more damaging narratives. “What you see is something that’s actually one of the oldest tricks in the book: a political figure finds a disfavored minority and steps on their faces in order to try to gain power,” he said. “he definitely needs us talking about anything but his connections with Jeffrey Epstein.”
Buttigieg also warned that Trump’s broken promise to release Epstein-related files could alienate even his most loyal supporters. “That whole worldview is based on this idea that there are powerful people who were involved with Jeffrey Epstein, and he was going to fight them,” Buttigieg said. “But we all know for a fact… he was one of them.”
Buttigieg also reflected on the personal in the interview. Now based in Michigan, he shared parenting stories, including negotiating pasta sauce preferences between his twins and rescuing a wallet from the trash. He also described how stepping back from government has allowed him to spend more time with his husband, Chasten, and their children. Still, the former mayor of South Bend made clear that he hasn’t stepped away from politics entirely.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said. “I owe it to [my kids] to have a good answer when they ask what I was doing in the 2020s, when America was approaching her 250th birthday. Whether this was a brutal patch that led to renewal, or whether it was the end of the video game.”
Watch Pete Buttigieg on The People’s Cabinet below.
- YouTube youtu.be
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