Pete Buttigieg Thinks 'We're Still Underreacting to Project 2025'
CHICAGO —At a Thursday morning delegate breakfast to kick off the final day of the Democratic National Convention, Transportation Secretary and Democratic Party wunderkind Pete Buttigieg dedicated a chunk of his remarks to hitting Republicans on Project 2025—the extremist agenda right-wingers have drafted to ruin all our lives if Donald Trump is reelected. "I actually think we're still underreacting to Project 2025," Buttigieg said inside a meeting room at the Sheraton Grand Hotel.
"This is an extraordinary thing, that the biggest scandal to hit the Republican Party in the 2024 election, the one that's the most damaging, the one they're actually most afraid of, the one that's gotten them doing damage control, isn't a criminal cover-up—although they got one of those too. It isn't a sex scandal, although..." he trailed off, alluding to the former president's felony trial earlier this year for alleged, criminal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016. "It's that they wrote down their own policies, and everybody saw what they're planning to do in this country, and it's wildly unpopular."
Buttigieg was also a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night and said that Trump, JD Vance, and Republicans writ large "might not recover" from Project 2025—which, again, is their own policies.
Over the last several weeks, Democrats have campaigned heavily on the existential threat of Project 2025, and on Wednesday night, it took center stage at the United Center when Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson whipped out an oversized printed prop of the 900-page plan and walked the nation through its varying policies. During his impressively insightful remarks, Thompson even introduced the nation to the Comstock Act, a little-known zombie law from the 1800s that a Republican president could wield to bypass Congress and impose a national abortion ban. While on stage and on the phone with an OB/GYN, Thompson told the audience, “Page 459 of Project 2025 references a law from the 1800s called the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide and throw healthcare providers in jail."
To Buttigieg's point, Republicans like Trump have been doing their darndest to distance themselves from their own policies on the campaign trail. Trump has publicly disavowed and denied affiliation with Project 2025 and its writers at the Heritage Foundation—even as he appointed Project 2025 writers to the Republican platform committee in July. Last week, a Project 2025 co-author said on-camera that Trump had "blessed" their agenda. Quite the scandal indeed...
Subscribe to Jezebel and follow us on Instagram and Twitter for continued coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.