"It's not that complicated": Pete Buttigieg on why a gay billionaire is backing JD Vance

In a segment of "Real Time with Bill Maher" at the start of the weekend, openly gay United States Secretary of Transportation and one-time presidential hopeful, Pete Buttigieg, was asked to lay out his thoughts on why Peter Thiel — gay billionaire and former CEO of PayPal — has supported JD Vance's political career thus far, despite Vance's anti-LGBTQ+ stance.

Buttigieg offers a simple explanation: Money follows money.

"I think it's a profound contradiction, but maybe it's not that complicated," Buttigieg says. "I know there are a lot of folks who say, 'What's going on with these Silicon Valley folks veering into Trump world with JD Vance, and backing Trump?' . . . We've made it way too complicated. It's super simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican party that tends to do good things for very rich men."

Following Trump's announcement at the Republican National Convention that Vance is officially moving forward as his pick for VP, publications like USA Today did some digging on Vance's financial backers and found that his ties to Thiel go all the way back to 2011, when Vance was a student at Yale Law School and Thiel was a venture capitalist, going on to donate $15 million to support Vance's campaign to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.

"I knew a lot of people like him," Buttigieg said of Vance, looking back at his own Ivy League days spent at Harvard. "I found a lot of people like him who would say whatever they needed to, to get ahead. Five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that's what he was . . . Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that he's the greatest guy since sliced bread."

Using Mike Pence as another example of someone who he initially knew as having very different values than Trump, but embraced him in order to get power, only to be offered up as a sacrifice at the end when he held on to "the last shred of integrity he still had" during the events of Jan. 6, Buttigieg hopes for a better outcome for Vance's run as vice president, should his chosen team win.

"I hope things work out a little bit better for JD Vance than they did for Mike Pence," he says.