Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg cannot speak directly on Ron DeSantis’ campaign video that openly criticized Donald Trump’s limited sympathy toward LGBTQ people due to the Hatch Act.
But that didn’t stop him from wondering why DeSantis couldn’t do anything better with his time—and getting in one devastating dig at the 2024 hopeful.
“I'm going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up shirtless bodybuilders and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space,” Buttigieg told Dana Bash during Sunday’s State of the Union. “Which is, again, who are you trying to help? Who are you trying to make better off? And what public policy problems do you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?”
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Buttigieg was referring to a video posted on Friday by the “DeSantisWarRoom” Twitter account, which spliced videos of Trump seemingly embracing LGBTQ support with clips of DeSantis’ actions as Florida governor that have targeted the community, including his laws on trans rights and his comments on drag queens. The video also seemingly compared DeSantis to American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman and The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort, though it offered no explanation for their association.
The video, which was posted the same day the Supreme Court ruled that businesses may choose not to serve LGBTQ people if its owners feel their religious beliefs are violated, was regarded by critics as homophobic, including by groups that represent gay and lesbian Republicans.
“Conservatives understand that we need to protect our kids, preserve women's sports, safeguard women's spaces and strengthen parental rights, but Ron DeSantis' extreme rhetoric goes has just ventured into homophobic territory,” the Log Cabin Republicans, one of the largest such groups, wrote on Twitter on Friday.
Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s rapid response director, defended the advert as a mere critique of the federal recognition of Pride Month and the “poison” that is “identity politics.”
“Opposing the federal recognition of ‘Pride Month’ isn’t ‘homophobic,’” she wrote in response to Richard Grenell, an openly gay former Trump official. “We wouldn’t support a month to celebrate straight people for sexual orientation, either... It’s unnecessary, divisive, pandering.”
Still, in his State of the Union interview on Sunday, Buttigieg could not see the public good the video brought, touting his own department’s work in addressing flood management in Kentucky and a railroad crossing in North Dakota as counterexamples.
“These are the kinds of problems that most of us got into government, politics, and public service in order to work on,” Buttigieg said. “And I just don’t understand the mentality of somebody who gets up in the morning thinking that he’s going to prove his worth by competing over who can make life hardest for a hard-hit community that is already so vulnerable in America.”
