During an appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tore into Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).
Buttigieg began the segment by attempting to explain why wealthy Silicon Valley tech executives (Vance previously worked in Silicon Valley) are now lining up behind the Republican ticket. The former South Bend, Indiana mayor said California's tech CEOs are typically believed "to care about climate, supposed to be pro-science and rational and libertarians," and that "normally libertarians don't like authoritarians." But he said Americans have "made it way too complicated" and the the true explanation is "super simple."
"These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party, that tends to do good things for very rich men," Buttigieg said to loud applause. "That's kind of what you're getting with JD [Vance], right?
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Buttigieg then pivoted to the Ohio senator, saying that when he attended Harvard University, he "found a lot of people like him, who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead." He reminded the audience that before Trump rose to power, it was popular to be an anti-Trump Republican, so Vance put himself in that role. The transportation secretary noted that at one point, Vance called Trump an "opioid, which is kind of a weird thing to say," prompting laughter from both Maher and the audience.
"For somebody whose identity is that they're connected to Appalachia, which has an opioid crisis, that really is the darkest thing you could possibly say about Donald Trump, at least in public," Buttigieg said. "Behind the scenes, he was actually calling him 'Hitler,' right? Seriously!"
He then noted that Vance was a lot like his home state's former governor, Mike Pence — not just in that he became Trump's running mate, but because both men appeared to compromise their core values in exchange for power.
"I watched [Pence] start out as an evangelical Christian who cared about rectitude and family values, and then get on board with a guy who was mixed up with a porn star, and make excuses for him," Buttigieg said. "He got four glorious years, I guess, as vice president of the United States. And it ended on the West front of the U.S. Capitol with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government."
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"So I guess, maybe not as a politician but as a human being, what I'll say is that I hope things work out a little bit better for JD Vance than they did for Pence," he added.
To Buttigieg's point, the former vice president is not only no longer Trump's top deputy, but has since refused to endorse him, and was notably absent from last week's Republican National Convention. One delegate told Mother Jones that Pence "betrayed his country" by refusing to help Trump try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Watch Buttigieg's segment by clicking this link.
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