This week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spent some time with Jon Stewart on the comedian’s The Weekly Show podcast, breaking down the president’s first months back in the White House.  

“It’s total chaos,” former Mayor Buttigieg said — and it’s by design.

“There’s a logic here,” Buttigieg explained, seen clearly in the president’s seemingly random tariff war.

“Where it comes on the trade deals, especially if you make it completely chaotic, the only organizing principle is this man himself. Then all that matters is which country, which industry, which company got to the man and convinced him, or flattered him, or whatever it took — got him to give them some mercy,” he said.

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“And the more it works that way, the more it’s total chaos,” he added.

It’s in service, Buttigieg believes, of the president’s term-limitless belief that he’s been elected a king.  

When “you get to the man, you get to the king, right?” Buttigieg asked.

“That’s a terrible way to make policy, and it’s terribly unfair,” Buttigieg said, “but also, I gotta believe that definitely most liberals, most thoughtful conservatives I’ve ever talked to, and any libertarian that gets — literally — the entire point of this country is that we don’t have a king. That we don’t have some guy who got off the wrong side of the bed this morning is going to decide your fate. But actually, we have rules, and we have things we often negotiate over, and fight over, and there’s winners and losers, but we come together in this process.”

Setting his subjects against each other is by the president’s design, as well, Buttigieg said.

“Of course, you’re going to start with a disfavored group,” Buttigieg said, “and it’s often — not always — but usually it’s immigrants. But over history, it’s been gays, it’s been Jews.”

“All the hits,” Stewart injected.

“But it never stops there,” Buttigieg added.

Buttigieg showed up to Stewart’s broadcast with a healthy facial scruff following his four years in the cabinet of former President Joe Biden. 

“It’s very rare in my former life that I’ve gone more than a day without shaving,” he said, and was unsparing in his criticism of the president and his billionaire advisors and cronies. Buttigieg also admitted that the international economic framework the U.S. assembled in the 20th century wasn’t meeting the needs of Americans at the beginning of the 21st.

“The process we inherited sucks,” Buttigieg said.

“Let’s be clear: This is not about going back to what we had before,” he said of the president’s “good ol’ days” MAGA fantasy as well as the president’s dismantlement of the federal bureaucracy and international order. “You destroy something, you destroy everything that was good and everything that was bad about it.”

“But these are real problems,” he said. “The challenge now becomes, especially for my party — just transfixed in horror by what we see all around us — is to have an answer that’s better than, ‘This is terrible.'”

“It is going to take some introspection in my party and in our country to come back to, ‘What are the priorities?’ Because it can’t be, ‘I’m letting the perfect be the enemy of the good,'” Buttigieg added. “I think that has cost us in the extreme in many ways as a country.”

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