Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg knocked Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) on Friday, comparing his journey to the GOP vice presidential nomination with the path that former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s previous running mate, once took on his way to the vice presidency.
“Behind the scenes, apparently, he’s actually calling him Hitler, right?” Buttigieg said on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” referring to private remarks that Vance made about Trump in 2016.
“Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that he’s the greatest guy since sliced bread. And I actually watched this exact same process with somebody else I got to know in my days in the Midwest, which was my former governor, Mike Pence.”
Buttigieg — who said people like Vance say whatever they must to “get ahead” — added that the Ohio senator used to be an anti-Trump Republican who described the businessman and reality star as “unfit” to be president.
Buttigieg said he saw Pence, meanwhile, “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, make excuses for him so that he could have power.”
The former Democratic presidential candidate added: “He got four glorious years, I guess, as vice president of the United States. 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.”
The relationship between Pence — who’s said that anyone who “puts himself over the Constitution” should not be president — and Trump soured after the then vice president refused to block the certification of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
Pence criticized Trump on a number of occasions during his own 2024 presidential campaign, declaring that Trump and his “reckless” words endangered his family on the day of the deadly Capitol riot.
The former vice president announced in March that he wouldn’t be endorsing Trump’s current bid to retake the White House.
Buttigieg, in his appearance on “Real Time,” shared a message for Trump’s latest vice presidential pick, not “as a politician but as a human being.”
“I hope things work out a little bit better for JD Vance than they did for Mike Pence,” Buttigieg said.
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