Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Trump, Islamophobia, and His Presidential Bid

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2019

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is not a traditional candidate for the nation’s highest office. But recently, he’s turned heads with a slate of radical political reform proposals, including expanding the Supreme Court and eliminating the Electoral College, that may help differentiate him from the crowd. He also earned plaudits for a statement addressed to the South Bend Muslim community issued in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings, which contrasted sharply with President Trump’s equivocations on the subject of Islamophobia and white nationalism. “Mayor Pete” joins Mehdi Hasan on this week’s Deconstructed to talk about his path to the White House. Intercept D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim follows with thoughts on an increasingly crowded Democratic field.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's no secret that this president came to power largely by turning people against one another
0:05.1	and by taking advantage of the use of white nationalism.
0:09.5	He doesn't want to acknowledge that it's a problem, probably because he's sympathetic to it.
0:19.6	Welcome to Deconstructed, I'm Mehdi Hassan.
0:21.9	My guest today is not just a rising star of the Democratic Party,
0:25.3	he's running for president.
0:26.6	I think we're at a moment of tectonic change in where this country has had the 30 or 40-year
0:31.6	era of conservatism that both Democrats and Republicans have operated in.
0:36.2	For most of my lifetime, this has come to an end.
0:38.8	That's Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Rhodes Scholar, Army vet, and just 37 years old.
0:45.6	But he's making a lot of noise in the Democratic presidential race right now,
0:48.8	and has won a lot of new admirers in recent days, especially for his response to the terror attacks
0:54.9	in New Zealand. So on today's show, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on Donald Trump,
1:00.4	white nationalism, Islamophobia, and how radical the Democrats need to get in order to win in 2020.
1:10.0	Police in the city of Christchurch in New Zealand say they are responding to reports of gunshots
1:15.5	at a mosque, possibly at more than one.
1:18.0	The suspect is a white nationalist extremist who posted a racist manifesto online and
1:22.9	streamed the attacks on Facebook. The death toll has risen to now a total of 50 dead.
1:29.2	Dozens more remain hospitalized.
1:32.1	It's been a truly depressing few days. The news out of New Zealand since last week has been
1:38.4	difficult to absorb. Each story that emerges of each one of those 50 innocent victims,
1:44.2	those Muslims and those two mosques, seems more horrific, more tragic than the one before.
	...

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