Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg knocked Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) on Friday, likening his journey becoming former President Donald Trump’s running mate to the path former Vice President Mike Pence took to be veep.
“Behind the scenes, apparently, he’s actually calling him Hitler, right? Seriously. Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that he’s the greatest guy since sliced bread,” Buttigieg said of Vance on an episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
“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 noted that people like Vance say whatever they need to in order to “get ahead” — said the Ohio senator used to be an anti-Trump Republican who described the former president as “unfit” and “cynical.”
He added that Pence started out as an evangelical Christian who cared about “rectitude and family values.”
″[Pence got] on board with a guy who was mixed up with a porn star, make excuses for him so that he could have power and then he did,” Buttigieg said.
“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 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 never be president — and Trump soured after the former vice president refused to block the certification of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
Pence criticized his old boss on a number of occasions during his unsuccessful 2024 bid, once declaring that Trump and his “reckless” words endangered his family on the day of the deadly Capitol riot.
The former vice president would later announce in March that he wouldn’t be endorsing Trump’s bid to return to 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.”
“What I’ll say is that I hope things work out a little bit better for JD Vance than they did for Mike Pence,” Buttigieg said.
