Pete Buttigieg

“I literally could not get a meeting with Secretary Pete Buttigieg. I couldn't do it. He just wouldn't take the meeting. And so, I don't know if it just wasn't important to him or whatever his reasons were, but as soon as the new administration, the administrat…”

“I don't know the details of the state and local proposals you just mentioned, but those sound on their face like they're further than I would go.”

“Are the wealthiest people in America right now paying too much tax or too little tax? I would say the wealthiest are paying too little tax, and whether you adjust that through income tax, whether you adjust that through, you know, something like wealth tax, an…”

“Often in terms of outright fraud, you know, they're gonna come in a number that's well below one percent”

“By definition, every penny it takes to build something more than what it was actually required is wasted, and I do think there's a lot of that.”

“Just in the four years I was secretary, We had about four billion passenger employments, so four billion times somebody got on an airplane, right? And zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of that four billion.”

“Yeah, if you create a monopoly, I might not like it. If you hurt other people, I might not like it. If you concentrate power into your hands to an extreme extent, I might not like it because that's just not American.”

“Well, look at the seventies and eighties, right? Sixties, seventies, eighties, look at GDP growth, productivity growth, and tax rates. I mean, I'm sure you're aware that those growth rates were higher, and the tax rates were higher too.”

“It's not terribly contested that the majority of the benefit of TCGA and OBBA went to wealthy people, and it's definitely not contested, or I'd say generally not contested, that OBBA represents one of the largest transfers of wealth from lower income people to…”

“Now, I would argue that Trump practices a kind of identity politics too, a sort of a white identity politics that makes people feel like they're encircled by the other, that immigrants are sort of an invasion.”

“I think identity has become too central to how my party thinks.”

“So we've got 435 seats in the house. Last time I checked, less than one out of 10 of them is considered to be seriously competitive. At best, like less than 40 are actually competitive, which means in nine out of 10 races, the primary is pretty much it.”

“One of the biggest problems we have as a society is this level of inequality we've hit. That like, historically, there's no evidence that any republic can reach this level of equality to hold onto it and continue to be a republic.”

“And I don't know that they can coexist for long if they're not held together by the awe of or fear of, you know, the personality of Donald Trump.”

“I would agree that the last administration didn't do enough and didn't do enough early enough on the border.”

“We got citizens who just have an accent or look brown, getting picked up, sometimes getting detained without access to a lawyer for a frighteningly long amount of time, and that's citizens, let alone other people who, you know, maybe they shouldn't be here, bu…”

“I think the debate was a real turning point. Yeah, I mean, the debate was a turning point, right, where you just saw, I think everybody saw what everybody saw.”

“I mean, if she had become the nominee by prevailing over another half dozen people who wanted a shot, Presumably that kind of sharpening that, that happens would have served her well in the general.”

“Even after they got their income, if they went through a training program and got another job in a field that was growing, but it wasn't who they thought they were, it wasn't connected to their sense of identity or belonging, then you continue to have a displa…”

“And the displacement that could come with that, I think, is enormous, and I don't think we're prepared.”

“I'll tell you, like, I'm in no hurry to be in the middle of presidential politics.”

“I love that even Pete Buttigieg and AOC have taken their pronouns off now, so even they were bullied into doing it to have to be part of the cause, which even they think is ridiculous, you know.”

“And so my bet that I would put on Polymarket right now is that The twenty-twenty-eight election is between JD Vance and AOC, or JD Vance and Buttigieg, because AOC and Buttigieg both can actually sit and be real people for several hours, and AOC's done it with…”

“I think the most senior Democratic person that went over there was Josh Shapiro, who's the governor of Pennsylvania. He got there before Buttigieg.”

“She winds up actually becoming president, and will be the first female president of the year of the history of the United States, and that could happen in the first term, or if Joe Biden doesn't run for a second term, and they do a halfway decent job, Kamala p…”

“I think that there is a, there's been a doctrine in the Democratic Party that to win the primary, you got to veer to the left. Right. You got to contend with Bernie. You got to contend with Elizabeth Warren, but ultimately that's a losing strategy in the elect…”

“We grew up around the auto industry when Studebaker was making cars, and we grew to a scale, ah, about a 130,000 at our peak. Now we're down to about a hundred, but growing again for the first time in a while.”

“If an idea or a technology or an approach works in a place like South Bend, that matters. We're also small. We're small enough you can get the attention of the mayor. We're small enough we can be creative around any regulations, tear down barriers.”

“And actually, the biggest issue I've had is just Dealing with people who want to know how much tax money we've spent on it, not understanding the business model, which is that we put no city cash at all.”

“You will never hear about a state or a local government shutting down over partisan disagreement, right? We deliver water. You need water to live. And so, it's not even on the table. We are under a pressure to deliver that, I think, compels us to be more open …”

“A lot of the resistance is actually inside government.”