Yes, things in Washington, D.C., are as bad as you think they are and, in fact, are worse than you realize, Pete Buttigieg told participants in the Together for Democracy conference Feb. 26.
The former secretary of transportation was the final speaker in the two-day by-invitation event sponsored by Democracy Forward. It brought together lawyers, educators, nonprofit leaders and advocates for democracy for two intensive days of dialogue on how to stand against the authoritarian agenda of the Trump administration.
Buttigieg appeared in a fireside chat with Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman, who asked him, “What has stood out to you in the opening weeks of this new administration? And is it worse than you thought?”
“We knew it would be bad; it was worse.”
“Yeah, it’s really, really, really bad,” he replied. “We knew it would be bad; it was worse.”
That echoed a theme of many of the event’s speakers, which included researchers, public officials, lawyers and nonprofit leaders lamenting the rapid barrage of executive orders and firings Trump’s team has rolled out.
America has been besieged with “not just a barrage but a barrage, a parade of horribles,” Buttigieg said.
Tempted to check out
It is so overwhelming that even he was tempted to check out and ignore reality, he confessed.
“There is a very understandable desire to check out. It is so important not to check out and to talk to our friends, our allies, our colleagues or former colleagues, donors who feel this impulse to check out and to say, ‘I get it, it’s understandable. But no.’
“If you talk to people who live in actual authoritarian environments, many will tell you the places they come from are not characterized by everybody being militantly pro regime. They’re characterized by most people being a little bit checked out about everything,” he continued. “It is the indifference that makes it possible for people like that to do what they do. And so we can’t check out.”
“It is the indifference that makes it possible for people like that to do what they do.”
The former Democratic candidate for president commended Democracy Forward for taking the lead in suing the Trump administration to stop what judges are — by and large — finding to be illegal and unconstitutional executive orders from Trump.
Perryman said her team preaches a message of hopeful engagement: “You are not powerless and Trump isn’t unstoppable. Look at and learn from the funding freeze and how quickly you forced surrender. And, of course, that’s a special thing for us at Democracy Ford since we won a court order blocking the funding freeze nationwide.”
Part of Trump’s strategy is to wear people down so they stop paying attention and check out, Buttigieg said. “Another part of the strategy we clearly see from those in charge right now is to make it seem like everybody’s getting steamrolled. That this is inevitable, unstoppable. That it is an expression of the omnipotent power of the new unitary executive. And so it’s wildly important to show that isn’t true and even more importantly to point out all the examples of why it isn’t true.”
The Trump team strategy of “flooding the zone” creates outrage upon outrage, “so that it’s harder to remember that we won on stopping the outrage before that,” he said. “That’s why the funding freeze thing was so important and is one of the first things they did. And they gave up, Trump gave up. Trump backed down. Trump surrendered. … Somebody who has said to never surrender, never give up, never back down, totally did because you made him.”
“Somebody who has said to never surrender, never give up, never back down, totally did because you made him.”
Hope in courts
History shows Trump doesn’t fare well in a court of law, Buttigieg said. “Think about the 2020 election among other things. In a court of law, you’re required to present evidence for your claims and there are punishments for lying. So it’s just not the best curve for them to be on. But the laws on our side in so many ways.”
“Our side,” he paused to explain, isn’t just “people who belong to my party. I mean the law is on the side of freedom-loving people who are committed to a country that is not led by a king.”
It is possible to stop the encroaching authoritarianism, he urged. “We have to not just get ready for the next hill to climb but take a minute to point out what has been achieved. … You have demonstrated that it is possible to stop at least some of this and that is incredibly important.”
The FAA and DEI
Perryman asked the former transportation secretary about Trump’s false claim that the mid-air collision of a civilian airplane and a military helicopter over the Potomac River was caused by DEI in the Federal Aviation Administration, which Buttigieg used to oversee.
“There are some things that can be unsurprising and shocking at the same time,” he responded. “So on one level it’s unsurprising; anything happens that’s bad and they’re going to find a way to make it about women and minorities and politicize it. That’s not unusual, but still we are right to be shocked by it.”
“Anything happens that’s bad and they’re going to find a way to make it about women and minorities and politicize it.”
Staff members at the FAA are good-hearted people who care about safety and have compassion for the families of those killed in the collision, he said. So much so that his former colleagues who no longer work at the FAA were reaching out to their replacements to check on them after the tragedy.
“And then we saw what happened next, an immediate politicization, this immediate attempt to somehow — based on of course no evidence or information — to somehow make it about DEI about women and minorities. And that’s kind of set the pattern for what they’ve done ever since. Again, it is shocking but not surprising.”
What Trump should have done as president, is address the humanity of the moment, Buttigieg suggested.
Instead, “that entire workforce got an email saying you might want to take a buyout and quit your job. Then after the crash the administration announced, ‘Oh, that never applied to the air traffic controllers, which was either bullshit or means they sent it to them by accident. I don’t know which is worse, right? But we’ve seen them repeatedly firing the wrong people.”
Federal employees are not the evil and lazy people Trump has portrayed them as being, he said. “Public servants have an understanding of the weight of being responsible for the well-being of other people.”
But Trump and his allies are projecting a different attitude, he warned. “We need to keep raising our voices about the fact that that attitude doesn’t just affect career civil servants, it affects all of us whom they serve.”
Explaining without condemning
Those like him who are concerned about these things need to find a way to talk with those who put Trump in office without condemning them, Buttigieg said. For example, chastising Arab American voters in Dearborn, Mich., for voting against Kamala Harris over Joe Biden’s lack of protection for Gaza.
“People did what they did for any number of complicated sets of reasons.”
“People did what they did for any number of complicated sets of reasons,” he said. “And by the way, each of us needs a certain amount of humility that if we grew up in a different household, in a different community and consume different media, we would hold positions that we sitting here consider perhaps to be horrifying. Have some humility about that and then talk to people as if you liked them, because hopefully you do. Politics is about how you make people feel about themselves. The biggest reason so many folks where I come from won’t listen to my party isn’t before we even get to what they think of us, it’s what they think we think of them.”
Perryman asked about the “weaponization of religion” by Trump and his allies, what she said is an effort “to take people’s rights away, deprive people of humanity and doing it in the name of religion.”
This is an important point, Buttigieg responded. “Just as our country was organized around the desire not to have to live under a king, our country was also organized by people who did not want to have to live subject to other people’s interpretation of their own religion, and they built a country that serves people or ought to serve people of every faith and of no faith on equal terms.
“And for those of us who are propelled by faith in our personal lives and in public life, I think we have an opportunity to be in touch with that as a moral touchstone that can build bridges. … I will argue to anybody who wants to have the argument that God does not want you to cut Medicaid or that if you are witnessing the richest person in the world organizing a process to cut the poorest people in the world off from measures that would save them. Every time I go to church, I mean last Sunday there was a Psalm that mentions that God sees the lowly but the proud he sees from afar.”
Related article:
Be ‘hopeful doom-scrollers,’ Pritzker urges