What Pete Buttigieg Learned Playing JD Vance
About this episode
Pete Buttigieg — former mayor of South Bend, surprise 2020 Iowa winner, transportation secretary, and one of the Democratic Party's sharpest communicators — joins Klein for a conversation about trust, the subject of his 2020 book. Klein's framing: the Democratic Party has lost the trust of people who once supported it, while Donald Trump's Republican Party has become the party of Americans who don't trust the system, the government, or Democrats — a sorting of the electorate by trust itself. They discuss what government and the party did to lose that trust, whether it can be earned back, and what Buttigieg learned about the opposition from playing JD Vance in debate preparation. A note on scope: the Hatch Act bars executive-branch officials from campaigning in their official capacity, so Klein couldn't press Buttigieg on much of his transportation record.