Pete Buttigieg mocks Trump’s pay-to-play White House

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg used a wide-ranging conversation in Alabama on Monday with Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin to draw a contrast between local problem-solving and what he characterized as the corrosive influence of money and fear in President Donald Trump's politics.

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Speaking before a packed audience at Birmingham’s historic Carver Theatre at an event organized by the political group Blueprint Alabama, Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor who many believe may be setting up a 2028 presidential run, and Woodfin fielded questions about wages, public transportation, immigration enforcement, housing, and the future of the Democratic Party. Though the discussion was largely focused on policy, Buttigieg used one pointed moment to criticize what he described as pay-to-play access to the White House.

“If you want policy to change, if you want this White House to take care of you, actually it’s surprisingly easy,” Buttigieg said. “Any one of you ought to try this. Take a million dollars, donate it to the ballroom that they’re building in the East Wing. Take another million dollars; I assume we all have a couple more lying around, right? Put it in the fund for that crypto company. Take another million dollars. Last time I checked, that is the entrance fee, not the membership, but just the initiation fee for a membership at Mar-a-Lago. And that’s all you’ve got to do to start getting your calls returned by this White House.”

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He continued, “Now, for those of us who don’t happen to have a few million dollars lying around to be able to do something like that, then it’s a problem, right? But that’s what we’ve been reduced to.”

In a 2024 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek conducted at Mar-a-Lago, staff at Trump’s club said membership had risen to about $700,000 and would increase to $1 million, with only a limited number of memberships remaining.

“We are going up to $1 million [per membership],” Trump’s club manager Bernd Lembck told the outlet. ”We are not desperate.”

Buttigieg and Woodfin discussed wages, public transportation, immigration enforcement, housing, and the future of the Democratic Party.

“At a moment where we are being buffeted by waves of uncertainty and a parade of horribles in terms of the abuses that we have been witnessing in our national politics,” Buttigieg said, “so much of our salvation will actually be coming from the local.”

Much of the hour-long exchange focused on questions submitted by community members. One asked about Alabama’s $7.25 minimum wage, unchanged since the federal floor was set in 2009.

“One job ought to be enough,” he said. “You get up, you go to work, you do good work, you should be able to expect wages and benefits that are enough that you can be confident of a roof over your head and food to eat.” Woodfin agreed that the current wage floor is out of step with economic reality, noting that estimates place Alabama's living wage well above it.

Another line of discussion turned to immigration enforcement. Buttigieg said many voters who backed stricter immigration policy expected a focus on violent criminals rather than longtime residents with families and businesses.

“A lot of people thought they were voting for a government that would find someone who was dangerous, who was a violent criminal, who had convictions, and deport them,” he said. “Not somebody who has been in the country for years raising children, paying taxes, often opening a business.”

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Woodfin said the effects ripple outward, shaping entire communities. “When you have that amount of fear and anxiety created from that amount of hate, you’re driving away families, and it affects not just school systems, it affects local business, it affects the economy,” he said.

The mayor also criticized federal agents who wear masks during enforcement operations. “Nowhere in America, any agency, local, state, or federal, those with badges should ever walk around with masks on,” Woodfin said. “Who are you? What are you doing? It’s Gestapo style. It’s just wrong.”

Buttigieg agreed, arguing that law enforcement wielding extraordinary authority should be identifiable to the public. “It’s not too much to ask that if we are going to give somebody life-or-death powers walking the streets of an American city, that they’d be expected to show their face,” he said.

Buttigieg also turned to the Democratic Party’s future, which has faced persistently low approval ratings. Recent NBC News polling found the party’s favorability hovering around 30 percent. “If things were working before, politically, socially, economically, we wouldn’t be here,” he said. “We need to be clear that the status quo is not what we have to offer. We’re selling something better.”

He closed on a note that was both personal and generational, referencing the young twins he is raising with his husband, author and former educator Chasten Buttigieg.

“Because we’re only halfway through this decade,” he said, imagining the questions his children might someday ask about the era. When they ask, “What were you doing in the 2020s?” he said he hopes to tell them that although “it got really rough for a while,” Americans ultimately “did what it took to make things better.”

He described a future in which the decade's struggles, from economic insecurity to political turmoil, led to reforms that strengthened democracy and expanded opportunity. In his telling, Americans built coalitions to defend civil liberties, ensure workers earned enough to live on, protect access to health care, and invest in public education.

Buttigieg also pointed to emerging challenges such as artificial intelligence, arguing that political choices made now will determine whether technological change concentrates wealth or improves people’s lives. “We saw artificial intelligence coming our way, and we saw the risk that came with it,” he said, adding that the goal should be policies that result in “less of a work week and more money in your pocket.”

If the country succeeds, he said, future generations might see the decade not only as a time of political turmoil but as a turning point that ultimately expanded “a higher level of rights and freedoms than my generation did.”

"When [my kids are] saying, “What were you doing in the 2020s?” Buttigieg said, “I want to be able to say, 'You know what we were doing?” It got really rough for a while. You can read about it in history books, but then we did what it took to make things better."

Watch Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin in conversation with Pete Buttigieg below.

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