Pete Buttigieg explains exactly why the “flailing” Trump campaign is bad at attacking Harris & Walz

Out Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the newly picked Democratic vice presidential nominee, has created a real problem for Republicans — namely, former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. J.D Vance (R-OH) don’t know how to attack him on a personal level.

Buttigieg told former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on her MSNBC show that Walz’s experiences as a high school social studies teacher, a football coach, and a military officer all have one thing in common: “They’re all about cultivating and supporting other people, and you can tell that’s what he’s about, and that’s what this ticket is about.”

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LGBTQ+ politicians & leaders celebrate Tim Walz’s VP selection

Their praise also contained lots of criticism of “weird” GOP VP pick J.D. Vance.

“I think it’s one of the reasons why the Trump campaign can’t figure out what to do with this ticket, even more so today than what’s been true ever since [Vice President Kamala Harris] became the [Democratic] nominee—they cannot fathom a campaign or any leaders who are not about themselves,” Buttigieg added.

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Harris publicly announced Walz as her running mate at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Monday evening. While Harris and Walz both criticized Trump’s criminal convictions as well as his and Vance’s past statements supporting the criminalization of abortion nationwide, Walz and Harris both said that the upcoming election isn’t about who’s running.

“Our campaign is not just a fight against Donald Trump,” Harris told the rally attendees on Monday night. “Our campaign, this campaign is a fight for the future. We fight for a future with affordable housing, affordable health care, affordable child care paid leave. We fight for a future where we build a broad-based economy, where every American has the opportunity to own a home, to start a business, and to build wealth… the chance not just to get by, but to get ahead. We fight for our future where we defend our most fundamental freedoms: the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride, and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”

Buttigieg said, “They’ve also made it clear that this campaign isn’t about them, it’s about you. It’s about us. It’s about the future of this country, and I think his personal qualities and his message really speak to that in a way that that’s going to continue that focus on the American people. That’s how [Harris is] going to win this election.”

Indeed, Psaki noted that Republicans have already begun attacking Walz as a “San Francisco liberal” with possible ties to the Chinese Communist Party because he and his wife have repeatedly visited the country. Some right-wing commenters have also described Walz as radical for his policies protecting trans minors’ access to gender-affirming care.

“You know, I think they’re they’re flailing right now,” Buttigieg said of Republicans. “They just don’t know how to respond to this campaign that, again, as excited as we are about the VP and her running mate, they not making it about themselves. It’s about all of us, and there’s just the Trump campaign doesn’t quite know what to do. They also definitely don’t know what to do with any effort to unify the country, so they’re going back to what they always do, which is division.”

“Of course, they’re trying to say that he’s too far left. They say that about literally any Democrat running against literally any Republican. If it was Joe Manchin, they’d be saying the same thing, because it’s all they know how to say,” Buttigieg continued. “They will try to redirect the conversation toward whatever is darkest and most divisive and most out of that same old playbook that we seen again and again again.”

“The more the Trump campaign flails in that old, dark, divisive mode, yeah, they’ll grab some attention here and there for whatever outrageous claims they make about our ticket, I don’t think a lot of it’s going to stick, because none of it’s true, and maybe most importantly, because I think people are just kind of bored with that sort of thing,” Buttigieg said.

Near the end of the interview, Psaki asked Buttigieg if he would help Walz prepare for a vice presidential debate against Vance. Buttigieg helped Harris prepare for her debate against Mike Pence in 2020 by playing the role of Pence.

“Obviously, I’ll make myself useful however I can,” Buttigieg replied. “although I’m still recovering a little bit from the experience of trying to inhabit the mind of Mike Pence in order to play that role for Kamala Harris when she was into debate prep four years ago.”

“Again,” he added, “I’ll do anything to help this ticket win.”

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