Buttigieg: Trump Supporters Voted To Burn The House Down, Now The House Is On Fire

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg talks to CNN's Chris Cuomo about how he would take on President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.





CUOMO: Everybody who gives an appraisal of your performance when you're doing these things, you check all the obvious boxes of being smart, articulate, you have an interesting background. You're young, which cuts both ways.

Now that we see what we're living, this is going to be an identity politics election. I'm not saying it should be.



BUTTIGIEG: Yes.



CUOMO: I'm saying it will be.



And when you're on that stage tomorrow night, how do you communicate to people that "I can take the most fearsome politician in a generation on toe-to-toe, and what he does to other people, he will not do to me. I can beat this President."



BUTTIGIEG: I'm not scared of this President. I mean this is a guy who was working on Season Seven of Celebrity Apprentice when I was driving armored vehicles outside the wire in Afghanistan. I'm not afraid to take him on.



The question is how do we take him on in a way that doesn't just empower him? You know, the - the - the gift of this President is to take any energy that goes his way, even if it's in the form of criticism, and turn it into a kind of food that he just grows off of, and gets bigger. That's the code that we've got to crack.



And I think the way to do it is to name and confront everything that he does wrong, but then immediately go back to talking about the impact that we will have on voters' lives.



If we're talking about him, that means we're not talking about you. If we're talking about your everyday life, that's what gives different voters a stake in this election, and also, by the way, unifies voters who have been divided by this White House's masterful practice--



CUOMO: Right.



BUTTIGIEG: --of White identity politics.



CUOMO: But this is how he won. And, you know, the trick of it is, you know, you have political correctness, and then you have perfect candor, OK? And that's what he's playing to, which is this talk of his, it's not that his supporters are deplorable.



You've been traveling - traveling this country. You know the disaffection is real. You know the pain is real, and that there are a lot of White Americans who feel forgotten by what others celebrate as diversity and multiculturalism. They see him as a proxy, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant proxy.



BUTTIGIEG: Yes. But he's playing them for suckers.



I mean he's the - the - the message that he's telling to these Americans is "Yes, you're not making enough money. Yes, your houses or - or housing is becoming unaffordable. College education is out of reach for your kids, and your job may be automated away in 10 years, but your big problem in life is political correctness."



That's what he's trying to get people to believe. And sure, a lot of people voted this way last time around because they had been so let down by people on both sides of the political spectrum that they decided to just vote to burn the house down because they felt disaffected or because they didn't like our nominee.



And this isn't to excuse the racism or the misogyny or the xenophobia in that campaign. But we should look at why those things found more fertile ground than usual, without excusing it.



And I think what we've got to now say to these voters is, OK. You voted to burn the house down. Now the house is on fire, but he has not done one thing to make your life better.



And if you think your problem is Brown people when your job is about to get automated away, and you don't have the retirement savings you need in order to actually have a dignified remainder of your life, then you're not going to make it--



CUOMO: He'll say I gave you the best economy ever.



BUTTIGIEG: --through this precedent (ph).



CUOMO: And I'm finally speaking the truth.



BUTTIGIEG: Yes, the best economy ever! I mean, under Obama, unemployment goes what, from 10 to 5? Trump sees it go from 5 to 4, and he thinks he's the one who - who - it's like that rooster in the morning, thinks he made the Sun come up.



Meanwhile, there's the very simple fact that while GDP is going up, life expectancy is going down. So, yes, the Dow's up. There's some nice economic numbers. Fantastic!



90 percent of Americans have not seen their incomes budge more than the slightest amount the entire time that I have been alive. This President - I mean this is a problem that goes back before this President, but he has done nothing.



Look, he and his ally, Mitch McConnell in the Senate are killing the Minimum Wage bill that was passed out of the House. They're killing every serious effort that has come about. The--



CUOMO: They say the Minimum Wage winds up actually reducing wage rolls because people are going to lose their jobs to make up for the mandate.



BUTTIGIEG: Yes, they say that as if it's a theoretical question, as if we didn't have decades' worth of data showing that that's not true.



This is what we're learning in this moment is that Reagan Conservatism economically is just like communism, sounds good in theory, but we tried it, and it failed in practice.



CUOMO: Tomorrow night, there's a good chance you're going to have to show you can take a punch. We've heard that Beto O'Rourke and there's some others now see you as a target.



You know, in this recent polling, it's very interesting to see how Biden recovered, since that last set of numbers after the first debate. You are in that same place, 5 to 7 percent. You got there quickly and surprisingly to people. You've stayed there. Now you're a target.



How are you going to take a punch tomorrow night, someone comes at you, and starts talking about your age and inexperience, that's the first one, how do you take that punch?



BUTTIGIEG: Look, I'm going to talk about why I'm the best person to be the nominee, and to be the President. And folks can poke holes. It's - it's what they do. That's part of what a debate is for. I welcome it.



And, you know, this is an opportunity for many Americans, many of whom, by the way, have not been following the blow-by-blow of the process, the way folks like you and I have, to take our measure, to see what we're made of, and what they're going to see is a different message, and a different kind of messenger.



I'm just not like the others, and I think that's going to come across tomorrow night.



[21:20:00] CUOMO: Do you have vulnerability digging into your past employment for Baker McKenzie (ph), what you were doing over there for them, the contractor, the consultants.



BUTTIGIEG: No. I - I did good work. I never worked on anything I didn't believe in, in my private sector career.



I also figured out pretty quickly that my heart was in public service. And after two or three years in business, I decided to commit myself to public service. It was definitely a - a pay cut. It was definitely a - a life change. But it's a good one.



And my military service, and my public service has really shaped me, and it shapes the heart that I bring to this Presidential campaign.



CUOMO: As I always say to people when they come on this show, in your position, one, I rarely get to say this, but thank you for your service--



BUTTIGIEG: Appreciate it.



CUOMO: --to the country. And two, I wish you good luck--



BUTTIGIEG: Thank you.



CUOMO: --because everybody's got to agree that we need better in terms of our dialog and our relationship with politics and the people than we're getting right now.



