Pete Buttigieg’s Blistering Takedown of J.D. Vance
Transportation Secretary Buttigieg speculated on why gay billionaire Peter Thiel heavily funded J.D. Vance's rise to power.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took a swipe at Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, casting the junior U.S. senator from Ohio as an opportunist with no moral core who owes much of his political career to being financially propped up by rich elites.
Appearing on the July 19 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher asked Buttigieg his opinion of Vance, as well as the support that Vance — an ardent social conservative who opposes marriage equality and legal protections for LGBTQ individuals — has received from gay billionaire Peter Thiel.
Vance’s rise to power came as a result of monetary donations from billionaire executives and investors — including Thiel, entrepreneur David Sacks, and Elon Musk, whom Vance met while working in Silicon Valley.
Thiel helped raise $120 million to help get Vance’s venture firm, Narya Capital, off the ground. He also reportedly helped Vance further make professional connections to advance Vance’s career, and gave $15 million to support Vance’s campaign for the U.S. Senate two years ago.
“I know him a little bit,” Buttigieg said of Vance. “Look, we’re from the same generation. We’re both from the Midwest. …I’ve run into a lot of guys like him.”
Regarding Thiel’s backing of Vance despite the latter’s vocally conservative stances on various social issues, Buttigieg said, “I know there are a lot of folks who say, ‘What’s going on with some of these Silicon Valley folks veering into Trump world with J.D. Vance and backing Trump? What are they thinking? Silicon Valley’s supposed to…care about climate. They’re supposed to be pro-science and rational and libertarians’ — normally libertarians don’t like authoritarians — ‘ What’s up with that?’
“I think we’ve made it way too complicated,” Buttigieg continued. “It’s super simple: These are very rich men who have decided to back [a] Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.”
Buttigieg added that Vance, despite his efforts to paint himself as a populist and the son of working-class Appalachia, will cater to the whims of rich elites if he becomes vice president.
“So I knew a lot of people like him when I got to Harvard,” Buttigieg said of Vance. “I found a lot of people like him, who would say whatever they needed to, to get ahead. And five years ago, that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican. So that’s what he was.
“He talked about how [Trump] was unfit, how he was cynical, called him an ‘opioid,’ which is kind of a weird thing to say about a person… But for somebody whose identity is that they’re connected to Appalachia, which has an opioid crisis, that really is the darkest thing you could say about Donald Trump, at least in public.
“But behind the scenes, apparently, he’s actually calling him Hitler, right? Seriously,” Buttigieg said, referring to the Ohio senator’s past rhetoric. “Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that [Trump]’s the greatest guy since sliced bread.”
Buttigieg compared Vance’s last-minute, politically-expedient conversion to a Trump acolyte to that of Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence.
Buttigieg said he “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 so that he could have power.”
Buttigieg noted that after four years in office, Pence’s bid for power “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 overturn the government.” (Pence has previously said he does not intend to endorse Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election.)
“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 J.D. Vance than they did for Mike Pence.”
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