“[Pence] got four glorious years, I guess, as vice president,” Buttigieg sarcastically told Maher . “And it ended on the west front of the Capitol with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government.”
Buttigieg went on, “Maybe not as a politician but as a human being, what I’ll say is: I hope things work out a little better for J.D. Vance than they did for Mike Pence.”
Gallows erected outside the capitol building to hang lawmakers who certified the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France Presse via Reuters
Buttigieg also told Maher that he thinks Vance will do whatever he needs to get ahead.
“I knew a lot of people like [Vance] when I got to Harvard, when I got to Harvard, I found a lot of people like him who would say whatever they needed to get ahead,” Buttigieg said. “And five years ago that seemed like being like an anti-Trump Republican, so that’s what he was.”
Buttigieg, who evidently did his homework, reminded Maher that Vance once referred to Trump as an “opioid” in a 2016 article for The Atlantic entitled “Opioid of the Masses.”
“Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it,” Vance wrote in the article.
“[He] called him an opioid, which is kind of a weird thing to call a person,” Buttigieg told Maher. “But for someone, whose identity is connected to Appalachia, which has an opioid crisis, that really is the darkest thing you can possibly say about Donald Trump.”
“Five years later, he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread,” Buttigieg added.
Buttigieg then compared Pence and Vance’s career trajectory, going from staunch nominally anti-Trump people to his VP.
“I actually watched this exact same process with someone else I used to know during my days in the Midwest, which was my former governor, Mike Pence,” Buttigieg explained. “Who, I watched, start out as an evangelical Christian who cared about rectitude and family values, and then get on board with a guy who was mixed up with a porn star.”
Maher further queried why Buttigieg thought someone like Peter Thiel, one of Vance’s confidants, would want to support Trump.
“I’ve had a couple people, who knew you were coming on, ask me ‘ask Pete Buttigieg about Peter Thiel being so in love with J.D. Vance, who is against, flatly against, gay marriage,’” Maher asked Buttigieg.
“It’s super simple: these are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party, which tends to do good things for very rich men.”
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