Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg criticized President Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday, saying the speech was marked by “darkness” and “dazzle” but lacked substance on the affordability crisis.
“Look, it was classic Trump, right? It was a lot of darkness, and it was a lot of dazzle, but there was very, very little about the things that most affect our lives,” Buttigieg said in a post-speech interview on CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“I believe politics is about everyday life,” he continued. “It’s about what government can and must do to make our everyday lives better. And the biggest issue on people’s minds — the affordability of everyday life — is not something that got more than a few seconds of mention in his speech.”
Buttigieg, a former Democratic presidential candidate, also took aim at the president for not mentioning the “tax cuts for the rich,” which he described as “the biggest thing that he’s working on.”
“But it’s always like this, right?” he added. “It’s always going to be about, they’re going to talk about Greenland and about pronouns and about mice, and not about what’s going to actually make our lives better.”
Trump delivered his first major address to lawmakers in his second term Tuesday night, in a speech that was celebrated by many supporters as uplifting and hopeful but derided by his Democratic opponents as partisan and riddled with inaccuracies.
Snap polls taken after the speech — which typically attracts viewers of the president’s same party — showed the majority of people watching approved of his address.
But Buttigieg leaned into Democrats’ criticism of Trump’s speech, which lacks the official title of a “State of the Union” address but is otherwise nearly identical to the annual remarks a president gives to Congress.
“The state of the union is roiling, right? We’ve got divisions that we didn’t think could get any worse, that have been picked at and punched at again and again by the president, whose job is to unite the American people, who’s supposed to be a walking symbol of what Americans have in common, and instead, of course, we have something else,” the former secretary said when asked for his opinion.
“The state of the union, I think, is really confused about why our leaders are talking about renaming things on maps instead of getting the price of eggs down,” Buttigieg added.
“The state of the union is wondering whether we can get through another four years of being turned against each other by our own leaders, or whether we can be summoned into something better,” he said.
