CNN: Buttigieg responds to Fox News hosts after personal attacks

In a new interview with CNN’s Isaac Dovere, Pete Buttigieg discussed the Ohio train derailment and fired back at conservative critics.

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Transcript

This morning, we have a new CNN exclusive interview with the Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, speaking to our own Isaac Dovere about a judge is acknowledging some mistakes in his response to the East Palestine, Ohio train disaster. And he admits that he should have gone to the devastated community sooner.

The accident created a political firestorm with Buddha footage at its center. The transportation secretary has become a target of an almost unrelenting onslaught of professional and very personal attacks from conservative media What is the £150? What if not even a size small construction vest fits this guy? It’s draping off of him.

He looks like he’s wearing a costume. If Pothole Pitch seems lazy and out of touch to all of you, that is because it’s true. There’s never been a Cabinet secretary. This flame buoyantly incompetent and this so obviously uncaring, almost to the point of evil. If we’re being honest about it.

British Edge is now hitting back telling CNN it’s really rich to see some of these folks, the former president, these Fox hosts who are literally lifelong Card-Carrying, members of the East Coast elite, who wouldn’t know their way around a TJ Max if their life depended on it, to be presenting themselves

As if they genuinely care about the forgotten middle of the country. You think Tucker Carlson knows the difference between TJ Max and Kohl’s? CNN’s Isaac Dovere did that interview and joins us now, and he has the answer to that question. I was just kidding. I don’t know if this is just kidding.

But it is it is significant that he’s acknowledging the mistake, but also going on the offense a little bit. Yeah. Look what we’ve seen over the last bunch of weeks here with the train derailment and even before that with the flight delays and cancelations that Southwest, any time anything comes up about transportation,

Suddenly it’s people, the judges fault. And there’s a point in the article you don’t have that when when the price of eggs went up. It wasn’t like Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, was on the hot seat in this way, who the judge obviously ran for president and did pretty well.

There is a lot of speculation he’ll run for something more in the future. And that has made him a target. It’s made him a target from the right. It’s made him target for the left, even on things that he doesn’t really control. And in sitting with him, we drove around in

Kansas and Missouri on Monday of last week talking about this. You could see the frustration about it coming through. I asked him about that, about the criticism that he got in there and asked him about whether he said whether he went to Palestine because Donald Trump went. And people

Who think that that’s why he went and he said on the record, we said that’s bull, but use the full word there, then I want you to keep us from getting any fines. No, no, I can’t. But you know what was also interesting in your piece, you talked

To a Democratic member of Congress who will go nameless, nameless in the piece who says Britain’s appeal in 2020 has a fresh face, who wanted to get past the divisions and the divisions and move the nation forward. But this person says it’s sad to see him become a partizan brawler

On Twitter and cable news. He’s become the most polarizing member of Biden’s cabinet. So what is interesting to me about this is that I think there are a lot of ways that Democrats view bitter judges, almost like a viral cable news startup. When he goes on Fox News, a lot of Democrats

Who don’t even really like him in other areas cheer that on. But this member seemed to think that that was actually a knock on it. Yeah, I’m not sure that member is representative of the a lot of the other Democrats in the party and definitely not within the White House.

I mean, the White House loves to have secretary booted judge go across the cables, especially on Fox. It’s something he also did when he tried to make a run for the presidency. And they find they view him as one of their most effective communicators, even in a moment like this when they’re dealing

With the Ohio train derailment. I also just wanted to point out something, when you played that Tucker clip, he used the word flamboyant and he used the word evil. We know what he’s talking about there. He’s talking about an openly gay man by calling him flamboyant and evil, which also speaks to what

We have been talking about during the show, which is this larger message from Fox, from Republicans in trying to attack LGBTQ and transgender people as their wider campaign message. All right. I have to play this. This is from SNL. Kind of spoofing. Exactly. What you’re talking about. But you train exploded.

And who do we blame? Who do we blame? We blame. But Judge where words you judge, this was his responsibility. Unfortunately, he was too busy being a nerd and being gay. Dealt with a very much more important issue of should drains, have big boys and I mean, the fact that he is

Gay is such a huge part of this. Right. One of the things that I asked about was the attention to the shoes that he was wearing there and they were not work boots that he wore when he got to the train derailment site, their boots, their sort of fanciest boots.

And he said to me that that was maddening. And he got his voice, got a little tired as we were talking about this. And he said it’s just when people are talking about things like that, when I’m trying to talk about people’s lives and how to solve the problems here said

That these outlets need to make a choice where his words come, whether they are covering fashion or whether they’re covering policy and whether they’re covering what happens when people are trying to recover from a disaster like this. Yes. Before you jump in, Eva, I mean, one of the broader

Points of all of this is this is the transportation secretary we’re talking about. Most Americans have no idea who that person ever is. And here’s Ray LaHood, a former transportation secretary himself, saying he’s never heard of this level of criticism. Another against another secretary ever. And I’ve been following this a long time.

I’ve never seen it like this before. This is pure politics. It’s politics because people think he’s going to run for president. That’s why. And it is because of his identity. Right. He can’t change the fact that he is gay. And so many of these attacks are bad faith attacks. There’s a

Tweet from a prominent conservative suggesting that him and his husband holding their children is is everything that is emblematic of what’s wrong with America. He can’t he can’t do anything to really argue with that because the terms of the argument are not even fair. I will say, though, in his interview with you,

I think it is good that he is being so publicly contrite and saying, listen, yeah, I did mess up here. And then steering the conversation back to the policy and saying, hey, but now that we have Republicans attention, let’s hold the railroads accountable, something that Republicans in the past have not championed.

That’s probably the only way forward on an issue like this one. And to be clear, he did acknowledge that it was a misstep, not just on his part, but on the White House’s part to just not see the politics of this one coming when clearly this was getting picked up

Very heavily by conservative media as a as a political issue.

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