Pete Buttigieg Explains Why There's 'Even More' To Trump's Racist Debate Lie

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg argued on Thursday that it’s a “strategy” for Donald Trump to push the racist lie that Haitian immigrants are eating pets .

“There’s even more to it than demonizing immigrants, although that’s obviously part of what he’s doing,” Buttiegieg told CNN ’s Kaitlan Collins.

“This is a strategy to get us talking about the latest crazy thing he did, whatever urban legend he amplifies. Right now, it’s about people eating cats or geese or whatever because he cannot afford for us to be talking about his record,” he added.

On Tuesday, Trump amplified the claim to over 67 million people who watched the debate between him and Vice President Kamala Harris .

The former president took the lie on the road to an Arizona rally on Thursday.

Buttigieg told Collins that Trump doesn’t want Americans to discuss political issues including “how he demolished the right to choose” in the U.S. during his administration.

“The last thing he wants us to do is to talk about his record or his agenda so what he wants us talking about is whatever crazy nonsense he can thrust into the center of the internet and the media conversation,” said Buttigieg, who said the “distraction technique” isn’t harmless.

The city hall building in Springfield, Ohio — the city with a population of about 60,000 that’s at the center of the lie about immigrants — had to be evacuated Thursday after it received a bomb threat .

The father of a boy killed in an Ohio bus crash involving a Haitian immigrant driver also spoke out earlier this week, calling on “the hate” to cease and politicians to stop using his son’s name “as a political tool.” He said he wished his son was killed by a white man so an “incessant group of hate spewing people” would leave his family alone.

Buttigieg said it’s all part of Trump’s strategy.

“Again, this is strategic. I don’t give him credit for much but whether it’s this, whether it’s blurting out a racist remark in an auditorium full of Black journalists as he did a few weeks ago, whether it’s choosing 9/11 of all days to invite a 9/11 truther who said it was an inside job with him [to ceremonies],” he said.

He continued, “The purpose is to do something so outrageous that we have to talk about it, that journalists have to go in — if for no other reason than to run it down and debunk it when it’s false — and to try to suck up all the oxygen into that so that we’re not talking about his profoundly unpopular policy agenda, Project 2025, and all of the failures of his actual time in office.”