Buttigieg blasts Trump for ‘lazy’ campaign attacks: ‘He’s lost a step’

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wondered Friday if Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s heart was in the 2024 campaign anymore, calling his attacks on Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “pretty mushy and lazy.”

Buttigieg, whose name was also speculated to be in the Democratic vice presidential conversation, appeared on CNN to discuss a range of topics, including Trump’s Thursday press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort, which many critics described as “rambling.” The network played a clip of the former president’s remarks about Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.

Harris “picked a radical left man that … has positions that … it’s just not even possible to believe that they exist,” Trump said. “He’s going for things that nobody’s ever even heard of, heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds.”

The transportation secretary called that comment “another example of Trump’s inability to talk about what he is actually going to do to make anyone’s lives better.”

“What Tim Walz focused on and focuses on as governor is just that,” Buttigieg said. “You look at the achievements in Minnesota, and you don’t have to be a Democrat or a progressive to be, I think, really impressed with what he’s done.”

Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, listed examples of bills Walz signed during the 2023 Minnesota legislative session, including those that codified free school meals and paid family leave, and called the governor a “pretty commonsensical, middle-of-the-road Democrat.”

“This is a playbook that is as unimaginative as it is unconvincing ‘cause this is what Republicans say about literally any Democrat running against literally any Republican,” Buttigieg said. “They always say that they’re too far left. It could be Joe Manchin running for president and they’d say he’s too far left, but it’s also pretty mushy and lazy for Donald Trump’s best attack to be, what was it, ‘He’s heavily into lots of different worlds’? You’d think he’d at least be able to point to a few more specifics.”

The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said he gets the feeling that Trump’s “heart isn’t in this anymore,” to which CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins asked him if he thought the former president was a different candidate than he was during his past two bids for the White House.

“Yeah, I mean you can just tell that he’s lost a step,” Buttigieg said. “He’s getting mushier, fuzzier, more confused,” referring to Trump’s claim that he “went down in a helicopter” with Willie Brown, which the former San Francisco mayor and ex-boyfriend of Vice President Kamala Harris rejected.

“It does raise some real concerns about what’s happened to Donald Trump over the years, right?” Buttigieg said. “Is this a symptom of something, is he struggling to maintain a grip on reality or to tell the difference between dreams and what is real, or, best-case scenario, he’s just lying again.”

Trump, 78, has come under more scrutiny over his mental acuity since President Joe Biden, 81, dropped out of the race after dealing with his own cognitive concerns. With Harris, 59, now the Democratic presidential nominee instead of her boss, the former president is the oldest major-party nominee.

Harris and Trump have agreed to a Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News, which was originally scheduled with Biden as the Democratic participant. The June debate between the last two presidents catalyzed Biden’s exit from the race, and Trump appeared skeptical about going through with the agreement after Harris ascended to the top of the ticket.

The former president committed to the original plan Thursday, additionally proposing one debate on either side of that date, to which Harris’s campaign has not agreed.