Pete Buttigieg warns that beating Trump won’t fix what made him possible

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned Democrats on Sunday that defeating President Donald Trump would not be enough to repair the country, while Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey cast her reelection campaign as a defense against the administration’s attacks on immigrants, healthcare and LGBTQ+ rights.

Speaking at a fundraiser for Healey at the Gifford House in Provincetown, Buttigieg argued that Democrats must offer voters something more ambitious than a return to the political and economic order that existed before Trump. Healey, one of the country’s first out lesbian governors, told supporters that Massachusetts must serve as a bulwark against the president, and warned that Trump would attempt to undermine the midterm elections.

The event came one day after the formal conclusion of Family Week, the annual gathering that draws LGBTQ+ parents and their children to the Cape Cod community. In one of the nation’s best-known LGBTQ+ enclaves, both politicians framed queer freedom as part of a broader struggle over democracy, economic security and the power of government to protect people from Washington.

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Democrats need more than a return to normal

“What our task is before us is not just to reconstruct the broken pieces of the previous status quo,” Buttigieg said. “When we talk about something better, that means not just better than now. It means better than before.”

It was the central argument of his speech. Trump did not emerge from a country functioning as it should. The economic and political conditions that preceded him helped make his rise possible, Buttigieg said, and merely rewinding the clock would leave those conditions intact.

Buttigieg said he and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, had traveled through about 32 states since he left the Biden administration, including Republican-held communities that rarely host nationally prominent Democrats. He described drawing crowds in rural Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Georgia district represented by Republican former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

In those places, Buttigieg said, he has encountered independents and people he calls “future former Republicans” who believed Trump’s promises to lower prices and avoid foreign wars. Their disappointment, Buttigieg warned, does not mean they will automatically embrace Democrats.

“An opening is not the same thing as an answer,” he said.

Buttigieg sought to define that answer through issues he argued command broad support: universal access to healthcare, adequately funded public schools, abortion rights, progressive taxation and the freedom to live openly as an LGBTQ+ person.

“If you believe that in a free country, you get to be who you are and love who you love without anybody else telling you what to do or who to be, then you are not alone,” he said. “You are part of a powerful American majority.”

Provincetown had spent the previous week hosting LGBTQ+ families as Republican officials across the country continued targeting transgender people’s access to care, classroom discussions of LGBTQ+ people and the legal recognition of queer families.

Buttigieg also cautioned the crowd against assuming that Massachusetts’ liberal reputation would insulate it from the country’s political currents. “There’s no such thing as a permanently red state,” he said. “But there’s also no such thing as a permanently blue state.”

He praised Healey’s work as Massachusetts attorney general and governor, including her record on LGBTQ+ rights and her pursuit of federal funding for the Bourne and Sagamore bridges. He then urged supporters to donate, volunteer and organize during the final months of the campaign.

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Healey casts Massachusetts as a bulwark against Trump

Healey responded by calling Provincetown “Pete Town” and thanking Buttigieg for carrying a Democratic message into communities where the party has often failed to compete.

She then offered a more combative assessment of governing during Trump’s second term. Healey accused the administration of undermining healthcare, public education, scientific research, abortion access, gender-affirming care and protections for immigrants. She framed her reelection campaign as a defensive line against Washington.

The governor highlighted state investments in housing, education, vaccines and health insurance while promising to protect abortion and LGBTQ+ healthcare. She reserved some of her sharpest language for federal immigration enforcement, saying Massachusetts was moving to keep immigration agents out of schools, day care centers, hospitals and other sensitive locations.

“Stay off of state property,” Healey said. “Get out of Massachusetts.”

A warning that Trump will target the midterms

Healey closed with a warning that Trump would attempt to discredit or interfere with the midterm elections, pointing to his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential contest.

“He’s going to try to steal the midterms,” she said. Democrats, she said, must organize and win. “We’ve got to win,” Healey said, “and we’ve got to win here and across this country in such big numbers, by such big margins, so that there can be no doubt cast on the validity of the election results.”