Pete Buttigieg Shuts Down Fox News Spin On Trump's Frenzied Rally Pace

From superspreader crowds to supporters stranded in the cold, rally quantity doesn't mean quality, the former Democratic presidential candidate pointed out.
LOADINGERROR LOADING

Former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg shut down Fox News host Martha MacCallum’s suggestion that President Donald Trump’s jam-packed pace of campaign rallies was better than Joe Biden’s less numerous campaign stops.

“Just to be clear, the Trump campaign has made eight stops since Sunday; today is Wednesday,” MacCallum said to Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. “The Biden campaign stops have been two ... And as you say, this is a very competitive race, so it might turn out that less is more in this race; we’ll see. But it’s clearly something that strategists will be examining.”

“Yeah, I’m not really sure all of those visits from Donald Trump are really helping him though, right?” Buttigieg responded. “I look at Omaha, where he left his supporters out freezing in the cold, which is a great metaphor for how he’s treated his supporters more generally across the country. In Arizona you’ve got a bunch of people in a rally that has the potential to be a spreader event, which kind of symbolizes his inability to lead us out of this pandemic.”

MacCallum dismissed the comment, saying “we’ve heard that line a lot.”

“It’s fine,” she continued. “It may or may not be, and like I said we’ll see whose strategy turns out to be the right one.”

Buttigieg and MacCallum then launched into a discussion on Biden’s views on fracking. She asked Buttigieg if he believed it was good that fracking allowed the U.S. to become “energy independent from the Middle East.”

“Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons why Joe Biden defeated some Democrats who were further to his left who called for an outright ban on fracking, which he opposes,” Buttigieg said. “I think his position is one that really resonates with the American people who understand that in the long run, we’re going to need to continue transitioning to more renewable energy, which is obviously not going to happen when the sitting president of the United States says climate change is a hoax and that windmills kill birds.”

Trump at his rallies often falsely says Biden wants to ban fracking.

Following his appearance on the network, Buttigieg tweeted a segment of the interview and said that Trump was happy to have supporters cheer for him ― and then leave them freezing for hours as they awaited bus transport to their parked cars, as the president’s campaign did following his rally in Omaha, Nebraska, on Tuesday.

See the entire interview featuring Buttigieg and MacCallum below.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot