Mayor Pete Buttigieg appears on The View

South Bend’s Mayor Pete Buttigieg appeared on The View on Thursday to discuss his recent launch of an exploratory committee for the 2020 presidential race.

Buttigieg made the announcement in a video posted to Facebook and a new website, peteforamerica.com on January 23.

One of the show’s hosts, Whoopi Goldberg, mentioned the recent Washington Post article calling Buttigieg the “most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of,” and asked Buttigieg why he was exploring a presidential run at his age.

“My generation, our generation, is the one that provided most of the troops after 9/11. We’re the generation that grew up with school shootings as the norm. We’re the generation that will pay the bill for some of the tax policies right now. And we’re going to live through the impacts of climate change that are accelerating as we speak. If you’re thinking about what the world is going to look like in 2054, which is when I’ll be the current age of the current president, you just have a different sense of urgency around some of these issues because they’re not somebody else’s problems, they’re personal,” 37-year-old Buttigieg said.

On if he believes the country is ready for a gay president, Buttigieg said, “There’s only one way to find out.”

One of The View’s hosts, Sunny Hostin, recalled her time spent living in South Bend as a law student at the University of Notre Dame, prior to Buttigieg becoming mayor.

Hostin asked Buttigieg how being a mayor of a small city like South Bend could translate to becoming President of the United States.

“Are we sure that being a member of the U.S. Congress right now is a better preparation than leading a city of any size, especially a community like ours that is going through a really challenging transformation,” Buttigieg said. “When you’re a mayor, you get the call. It could be anything from a problem at the zoo, to an airplane crashing into a neighborhood to an officer involved shooting with racial tension all around it to who is going to be there to light up the Christmas tree to just plowing the snow.”

Other topics discussed during the show included intergenerational justice, Buttigieg’s experience in international policy during his time in Afghanistan, and the recent passing of the mayor’s father, Joseph Buttigieg, even recounting some of the last moments the two spent together.

“I told him I would make him proud. At that point he was on a ventilator. Around it he mouthed the words ‘you will’ and we had a notepad so we could still communicate,” Buttigieg said.

The View host Meghan McCain, whose politician and veteran father, John, passed away on August 25, 2018, thanked Buttigieg for speaking about the emotional moment on the show.

“I thought hard about coming here but I knew he would want me to,” Buttigeg said.