--:-- Steve Inskeep: Welcome to a special edition of Up First from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Thanks for having me on the show, Steve.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We had an extended talk with the former Transportation Secretary and presidential candidate. His party looks for a reset and presses President Trump on Jeffrey Epstein.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: You shouldn't have to be a Republican or a Democrat to care about making sure there's transparency on something as horrific as the abuses that happened.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Also, he's one of several possible presidential contenders with a beard. If you were to run, would you shave it? That's a double hypothetical.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: [laughs] Well, my beard is less related to deep societal meaning and more related to not feeling like shaving for the first time in 15 years where I'm not in office or on the ballot.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: [laughs] That's fair. Let's talk about the topic at hand. The House of Representatives has stepped aside for a number of weeks rather than address this issue. What do you think the public interest in that particular topic tells you about President Trump, about voters, about America right now?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Well, I think the public interest just got a lot deeper because one of our branches of government, the U.S. House of Representatives, has been shut down because the Republicans would rather close that half of the Congress than allow the Epstein files to come out or somehow impede President Trump's decision to block those files.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So I think what that tells you is, first of all, obviously something very sensitive for President Trump. But also I think it speaks more broadly to this pattern of events where the president has said he would do something when it suited him to say he would do it. And then when it's his interest to do the reverse, he'll do that.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He said he was going to cut prices on day one. He did the reverse. He said he was going to bring peace to the Middle East on day one, bring peace to Russia and Ukraine on day one. And he said that he was going to release these files right away. And now it's more in his interest to block them.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Is it true that you don't actually care about it?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Well, I think that every American now has a stake in this, if only because the Republicans would rather shut down the entire U.S. House of Representatives than have to vote on allowing these files to come to light.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: You shouldn't have to be a Republican or a Democrat to care about making sure there's transparency on something as horrific as the abuses that happened.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And to want to understand why an administration that promised to shed light on this decided not to. There's never been any real explanation of that.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I want to look at this in a little deeper sense as to what it says about the public, about people who are interested in this. I'm imagining that you would rather be talking about infrastructure or talking about economic fairness or affordability or something like that.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: This seems to be the thing that has captured the attention a lot of the public. And according to surveys, a lot of people simply do not believe they've been told the truth about that.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What does that public skepticism tell you more broadly about where voters are right now?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Well, I think it's a touchstone that reflects something much bigger about people feeling that their government isn't telling them the truth. And it's easy to see why frustration about that has reached a boiling point in this country.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But look, we've got a broader issue of a breakdown, a collapse really in societal trust. This has been going on for years. I wrote a whole book about this five years ago, and I think it's even more important now.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: On that matter of trust, somebody listening to this is going to say, well, Biden didn't release the Epstein file when he had the chance.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Yeah, he also didn't campaign promising that he would. I don't know how decisions were made in DOJ. That was different from my world.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But what I know is that Donald Trump made a big deal about this, promised to bring this to light right away. And now he's blocking it.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: There are also Republicans alleging that you and others in the administration did not say all you knew about President Biden's condition.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: How has age has affected him over time?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: That's not true. In my case, at least I told the truth, which is that he was old. You could see that he was old.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And also when it came to my ability to do my job and have my boss, my president, support me in that job, I always got whatever I needed from him from the Oval Office.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: You never had a moment before that famous presidential debate where you worried about whether he was all there?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: There were moments where I thought he's looking tired today or where I noticed that he was aging.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But there was never a moment where I thought this decision, this policy or this process is going worse or is wrong because of the fact that he's old.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Let me put a proposition on the table and we'll see if you agree with it or not. I think it's possible to say, looking at the last election, looking at the last several years, that the country has changed, that politics have changed, that Republicans figured that out and captured the moment, and Democrats have failed to do so up to now.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I would mostly agree.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Yeah. I think that Democrats have been slow to understand the changes in how people get their information, slow to understand some of the cultural changes that have been happening, and maybe most problematic of all, too attached to a status quo that has been failing us for a long time.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Right now, you've got an administration that is burning down so many of the most important institutions that we have in this country, which is wrong.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And I think that my party needs to do a better job of addressing the fundamental problems that have led people to mistrust everything.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But we are already in a dramatically different world than we were six months ago, let alone four years ago.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And that's about to change that much more, in my opinion, because of the rise of artificial intelligence.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And I think even now, even though it's a hot topic and people are discussing it all the time, there's a lot of hype.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think even now we are underreacting in a big way politically and substantively to what this is about to do to us as a country.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Artificial intelligence, you mean.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: What do you mean? What's the danger?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Well, in addition to the dangers that do get talked about a lot, the kind of apocalyptic scenarios of runaway robots and machines.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Nobody has a job. Yeah. The economic implications are the ones that I think could be the most disruptive the most quickly.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We're talking about whole categories of jobs where not in 30 or 40 years but in three or four, half of the entry-level jobs might not be there.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And if that happens as quickly as it might happen, it will be a bit like what I lived through as a kid in the industrial Midwest when trade and automation sucked away a lot of the auto jobs in the 90s. But 10 times, maybe 100 times more disruptive because it's happening on a more widespread basis and it's happening more quickly.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And you don't think that we're really reacting to that? We talk about it, but we're not doing anything.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I don't think we're asking big enough questions about what we would do if that many jobs got disrupted.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We're talking about changes that might be bigger and faster than anything we've seen since the 17th century, the Industrial Revolution, which is before the United States existed.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And, yeah, I think we're underreacting to that.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: You talked about the status quo and Democrats getting stuck defending the status quo One of your fellow Democrats Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has talked a lot about this recently.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And I can summarize his argument by saying Democrats need to be more populist We need to acknowledge that people are profoundly dissatisfied with the status quo.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We also, as Democrats, he would say, need to be tearing things down, need to be talking about the very few people who seem to be benefiting in this situation.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He also wants Democrats to be louder, a little more disruptive in government.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What do you make of his approach?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think it's certainly true that we can't be wedded to the old ways or the status quo.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It is wrong to burn down the Department of Education.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But I actually think it's also wrong to suppose that the Department of Education was just right in 2024.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: You could say the same thing about USAID.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It is unconscionable that children were left to die by the abrupt destruction of USAID.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Unconscionable.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It is also clear that USAID developed into something that nobody on a clean sheet would have designed the way it was.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: There were a lot of problems with development aid and how it was structured.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: My point is it's wrong to burn these things down.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But it's also wrong to suppose that if Democrats come back to power, our project should be to just tape the pieces together just the way that they were.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We should be unsentimental about the things that don't work.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We should be fearless in defending the things that do work.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And yes, we should be naming the forces, entities, people, often corporations who stand between a lot of Americans in a better, freer life.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: There's a particular small slice of that that I worked on when I was in transportation as, for example, a tough regulator of airlines trying to make sure that they treat their passengers better.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But across our entire society and economy, we could be doing better on that because this president has come to power promising to do that.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Now, what he's actually doing is exactly the reverse, a tax bill that makes it easier for the wealthiest and corporations and harder for the working class that he claims he represents.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But they're talking a good game and we need to be much more responsive to that.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What is the cultural change in America that you said you felt Democrats had missed?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think there's a perception that Democrats became so focused on identity that we no longer had a message that could actually speak to people across the board or that we were only for you if you fit into a certain identity bucket.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And the tragedy of that is that I believe the right kind of democratic vision is one that lifts everybody up.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It pays specific attention to discrimination or mistreatment of people because they're black or because they're women or LGBTQ or whatever reason that might be.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But you don't have to be in this particular combination of categories to benefit from what we have to offer.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And I think we really struggled to communicate something a bit more universal.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And that's been costly.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and former presidential candidate.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Coming up, how does he respond to some of the other critiques of the Democratic Party?
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--:-- Announcer: Their defeat to President Trump has prompted Democrats to challenge some of their party's strategies.
--:-- Announcer: And that was part of our discussion with Pete Buttigieg.
--:-- Announcer: Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff and holder of other significant positions as a Democrat, gave an interview to Megyn Kelly just the other day, and she asked a series of questions about trans people.
--:-- Announcer: He ended up contradicting most Democratic Party orthodoxy about trans people ended up by saying, agreeing with the idea that a man cannot become a woman, and then said he was going to head for the witness protection program because he was aware that some Democrats would be unhappy.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Well, I think the approach starts with compassion, compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young people who are going through this.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them, like wondering, wait a minute, I got a daughter in the sports league. Is she going to be competing with boys right now?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And just taking everybody seriously.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party, for example, around sports, where I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women's sports.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Meaning the parent who's complained about this has a case, in your opinion.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Sure.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And that's why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington, trying to use this as a political pawn.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: When President Trump says something like, no boys and girls sports, which is a phrase that they use, it sounds like you're not signing on to that.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think that chess is different from weightlifting and weightlifting is different from volleyball and, you know, middle school is different from the Olympics.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So that's exactly why I think that we shouldn't be grandstanding on this as politicians.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We should be empowering communities and organizations and schools to make the right decisions.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Let me ask about another argument that's been made about the Democratic Party and where it ought to go.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Let's call it the Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson School.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: There are a number of books, theirs is maybe the most famous one, that argues that government isn't working, isn't delivering for people.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And a large reason is because of the way that progressives have approached government, burdening people who want to build things with too many regulations, too many opportunities to stop something, nimbyism.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: As somebody who was a transportation secretary, you may be familiar with this argument.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Maybe I was familiar with it before.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Look, it is too hard to build things in this country.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Definitely my experience with transportation is that it is too expensive, too complicated, too lengthy to get things done.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And that's also true for a number of things that matter enormously to the fight against climate change, or I'd say the fight to slow climate change.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The need to build more clean power transmission and generation just to take a couple of issue sets.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So I think that they pointed to a number of things that are inarguably consistent with what I experienced.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: At the same time, I think it would be a mistake to suppose that that's all you have to do, that there's a set of burdensome regulations and if you just got rid of them, everything would go along just fine.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It does not relieve us of other things that need to happen in terms of adequately funding clean energy, transportation, housing, the other things that we need to build.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And recognizing where the issue has more to do with industry structure, especially, again, I think back to transportation where there's a lot of monopolies or oligopolies, railroads, airlines.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: How much of a disaster from your point of view is the administration creating by canceling so many projects in the middle, by ending subsidies for clean energy, on and on?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think it's hugely costly.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I think it will destroy jobs.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think it's going to lead to – we already know it's leading to higher costs of living.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Health insurance premiums are coming out for next year. They're higher because of the Trump budget.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Prices obviously are higher.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I think that's partly because of the Trump administration's policies.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Interest rates are going to be higher because of how much they've added to the national debt to make room for these tax cuts for the wealthiest.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Jobs, I mean take where I grew up, South Bend.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: One of the biggest things to happen, in fact, the biggest thing to happen in terms of a new auto industry investment since the 1960s when Studebaker stopped making cars is a facility going in in St. Joe County to create electric vehicle batteries.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It was even just building it, even before it opens, has employed members of the building and construction trades in that part of Indiana where I grew up at a level not seen, I think, in my lifetime.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Now the fate of that project and so many like it have been called into question in ways that are going to hurt our economy and, of course, also set us back in terms of dealing with climate change.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Have we surrendered to China when it comes to clean energy, electric vehicles, wind, solar, the whole bit?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Yeah, the Trump administration is surrendering to China right and left from pulling out of UNESCO so that China can exert more cultural control over how the world relates to its own heritage to very specific dollars and cents economic things.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And I think the tragedy of that is China is trying to corner the market on green and clean tech for a strategic reason.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I do not think that the Chinese Communist Party is sentimental about climate change.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I think they just recognize that this is a way to dominate the economy of the future.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: If you give those markets up to them as Trump seems determined to do the result is they will win
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I want to remind people that we talking in New York City where the Democratic candidate for mayor the nominee for mayor is Zohran Mamdani
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: What do you make of him?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I think that what he achieved is extraordinary
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And a big part of how he did it was by relentlessly focusing on affordability.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: No matter what the context, the topic, the news of the day, he went straight to the thing that was on New Yorkers' minds, which is how hard it is to afford anything, rent, groceries, you name it.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think that he also, just as a matter of campaign strategy, was omnipresent.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He was everywhere.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He was going on podcasts.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He was doing social media.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And so I think a lot of more conventional political operatives didn't see him coming.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Andrew Cuomo had a more conventional media campaign.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: For sure.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And I think in many ways, in addition to the moral disqualifications that went with his history.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He just didn't, if anything, he reminded, I think a lot of people of the status quo.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So I think a lot of people are focused on the leftism, the ideological leftism that, uh, I think we shouldn't be so surprised that prevailed in a New York democratic party primary.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But I think if my party wants to learn lessons from Mamdani's success that are portable to a place like Michigan where I live, it's less about the ideology and more about the message discipline of focusing on what people care about and the tactical wisdom of getting out there and talking to everybody.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I was talking the other day to a Democratic member of Congress representing part of New York City who said to me, essentially what you're saying, Mom Donnie in many ways is the future.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He knew how to campaign.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He's doing everything right.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: There's a lot to learn from him.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And this lawmaker said, I haven't endorsed him yet because I have a lot of Orthodox Jews in my district.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Yeah.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What do you make of that contradiction?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Yeah. I mean, again, it's kind of distinguishing between tactics and ideology.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And I would say, you know, he's further left than I am.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But also, I think that what he's been able to do is something that our party ought to learn from.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Would you endorse him?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Say, Big Ten approach.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I don't agree with him about everything, but I endorse him.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He hasn't asked me to endorse.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I'm not really a player in New York City municipal Aesthetically, let's say that he asked.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I would talk to him about it, sure.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: You would talk to him about it, meaning you're not sure that you would or wouldn't.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Yeah, I would want – to be honest, as somebody who follows this from afar but hasn't exactly dug in on it, I haven't kind of dug in on these policy proposals he's put forward and how they would actually work.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I think the most important job, though, of any mayor – and by the way, I also emerged as a very young, some would have said untested, disruptive figure running for mayor, right?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The most important job of any mayor is to pull a community together.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: You are the walking symbol of what all of the diverse, disparate people in your city have in common.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And if I get a chance to talk with him, I'll want to talk with him about how he aims to do that.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I've often felt that New York City mayors come to embody their city and that mayors in general come to embody the city in some way if they do the job well.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Yeah, which is this amazing thing that happens.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I mean, even in my city where I served of South Bend, Indiana, you really do gradually feel like you're sort of becoming the city.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: You're morphing into it, which means you kind of rise and fall with the city.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And sometimes it means you take on board this pain when things are hurting in the city.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But it also means you just extend yourself to other people in this beautiful way that I think is one of the reasons why Mayer might be the most important and unique office in American politics.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I want to ask a little bit about his policy proposals.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: There's been so much discussion on NPR and elsewhere about his identity and what it means.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But I wonder what some of his actual proposals mean.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think of a proposal that he has because of affordability.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It's impossible to live in New York.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He proposes a rent freeze.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And when I hear that as a former resident of New York City who lived at one time in a rent-stabilized apartment, I think about the fact that New York has had various forms of rent control and rent stabilizations.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So for generations, the government has tried this in various ways.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And still nobody can afford to live here.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And it's extremely expensive.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And his proposal now is to freeze rents at the level at which people already say they can't afford.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think there's some very logical questions to ask about both who that helps and what comes next.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Because if housing is unaffordable, one of the reasons is there's not enough housing.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I mean, that's just a basic clear fact.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So what are you doing to make sure that there's more housing as well as making sure people can afford to live?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But then, of course, another part of it is there's always the price.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: When we talk about affordability, there's price and there's income.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So getting prices under control is a big deal and very important.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Obviously, one of the most, probably the most important, economically important broken promise of the Trump administration is they said they'd lower prices and instead they're actually artificially increasing them with tariffs.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But the other side is income.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So what is it going to take to make sure that people have income that meets the expenses that they face?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And I'm not a detailed student of how those policies have been put forward in this New York election, but those are the questions I think would need to be answered for this to hold together.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: If Momdani were here, and in fact, he was interviewed in this very studio, he might say, no, no, I also have a plan to build more public housing.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He wants the government to be engaged in building housing.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Does it make sense for the government to be doing that as opposed to the private sector?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It can, if there's a market failure.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And I think there are market failures certainly applying to housing in cities.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But in some ways, this also brings us back to some of the things that the people in the abundance debate have pointed out, that it is too expensive.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Also, it is too expensive for the government to build housing in many jurisdictions.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It is more expensive for the government to build housing in California than it is in Texas.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Understanding why and dealing with those is going to be vitally important, just like it was in transportation, for any public investment to actually deliver the results that it's supposed to.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Otherwise, people will get even more angry because you've spent the money and you haven't solved the problem.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Now, when Buttigieg ran for president in 2020, he was seen as new and interesting, a candidate under 40, and also considered more centrist than some others, a Midwesterner who knew how to talk Midwestern.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And you can hear his reluctance to sign on to Mamdani's campaign substance, even as he praises the campaign's style.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: When we return, the Democrat talks about the politics of fear, the politics of courage at his beard.
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--:-- Steve Inskeep: I want to zoom back and ask how you think about the president that your party is now facing.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I would go well beyond bad president.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: There are presidents who you disagree with and presidents you agree with.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: This is, I think, categorically different.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We have not had a president, left, right, or center, who has tried to destroy companies, universities, and broadcasters who criticize his government.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: There's been rough and tumble politics all through U.S. history.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But that is not just different. It's different in a way that offends every fiber of American civic values, left, right, and center.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We have had disagreements over court rulings, but never had an administration that has been so ready to just say no when a court says you have to do this.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: That is threatening at a different and much deeper level than the regular kind of push-pull of the separation of powers between the executive and the courts.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We have a president who really is attempting to become an autocrat and in some ways has succeeded.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Has succeeded?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He has succeeded in changing the conduct of private actors, universities, companies, broadcasters, I think.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: That is as big a part or bigger of what autocracy looks like than that self-editing that he's causing to happen than kind of direct government control.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So yes, in some ways he succeeded.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Now, whether that holds or whether that changes, that's up to the rest of us, especially because he's doing it in the service of a very unpopular agenda, tax cuts for the rich, cuts to Medicaid and Social security empowerment of corporations that are already too powerful.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But I also think, to come back to what I was saying earlier, that some of the things that are underway and about to accelerate, like the rise of artificial intelligence, will create completely novel challenges that the next round of American leadership will have to contend with, that even the intense persona and concentrated power that Donald Trump represents, cannot respond to on today's terms.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Does the situation call for Democrats to make some kind of extreme or emergency response?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think a lot of people feel as a kind of emotional matter that more has to happen.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I think it's been harder to explain or express what that actually looks like, largely because it's hitting up against the simple fact that we are out of power.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: What I think we need to do is connect with the people we haven't been reaching and aspire not to get 51%, but 60 you know real landslides used to happen We used to have 60 40 presidential elections Now it always 51 49 We should aim much higher especially because most of our policies actually have 60 support on most issues You name it.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Taxes, healthcare, choice, even stuff like marriage or background checks on guns where we've been a little bit afraid of our own positions.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Like, most people are with us.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So obviously our ambition is not matching where we ought to be.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And that's going to take intellectual ambition too.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: How do we redesign these institutions that we inherited from basically the New Deal period and that have been smashed to pieces domestically and internationally?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: How do we contend with something as fundamentally novel as AI?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But it's that. It's not theatrics.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I mean theatrics have their place in politics, I guess, but it's not that you have to go out and set yourself on fire to get attention.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It's actually having a good response to what's on people's minds and then taking it everywhere.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: As you're talking, I'm thinking of the historian Robert Dalek, who wrote a biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was president at another time when a lot of people were losing faith in democracy.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And Roosevelt, he says, seemed to be conscious of that and went for 60-40 positions.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He often refrained from doing things he might like to do.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: In fact, history later criticized him for some things he did not want to do because he always wanted to be on the side of 60% of the people.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: That's what you're talking about, I think.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I would put it this way.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: There's some things that 100% of people should be able to get behind, including freedom of the press and free expression and the rule of law and equal justice before the law.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And all of us should just agree on that.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Then there's the level of kind of contested policies, what I'm talking about here, where we could start right now focusing on the things where most people are with us and at least try to deliver those first before we get into things where we might have a little more persuasion to do.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Most people already get that we should have paid family leave in this country.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Most people already get that your healthcare should be taken care of one way or the other in this country, and so on and so on and so on.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And then there's some ideas that maybe do need more pushing to get people used to them, things I tried to advocate for back when I was running for president.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We should spend most of our time and effort, I think, on things that we really know should happen, that Republicans are against, but Americans are for, and be asked to get a chance to implement them.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: As you're talking, I'm thinking about the fact that Democrats warned that the president would do a lot of these things if he was elected.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He has done a lot of these things.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Many of his policies have been unpopular.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And yet he still has this fundamental base of support.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It's somewhere in the 40s, according to surveys.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And a lot of other people don't seem that alarmed, don't seem as alarmed as you are about what the president is doing.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Why do you think that is?
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Well, in terms of what it would take for him and his supporters to break faith with each other, I think we have learned it's a very high bar because Trumpism has become a worldview unto itself.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But I think there are moments where he has revealed how little respect he has for his own supporters.
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: That's one of the reasons why I think the Epstein saga is especially relevant, because by telling them that this was important and that he would do something, and then by turning around saying he won't do something and that they're stupid if they care about this, he's putting his thumb in their eye even
