Pete Buttigieg Fires Back at Rush Limbaugh’s Homophobic Attacks on ‘Ellen’

What better platform than The Ellen DeGeneres Show for Pete Buttigieg to share his unvarnished thoughts about Rush Limbaugh?

During the 2020 hopeful’s swing through Los Angeles on Thursday, he made his second appearance on the daytime talk show, this time near the top of the Democratic field. With that increased confidence, Buttigieg was eager to fire back at Limbaugh, who recently made some seriously homophobic comments about the candidate and later revealed that President Trump himself told him to never apologize.

“Look, I guess he just has a different idea of what makes a man than I do,” Buttigieg said of Limbaugh, who had questioned his masculinity next to Trump. “I’m not going to take lectures on family values from the likes of Rush Limbaugh or anybody who supports Donald Trump, frankly. You know, when I was packing my bags for Afghanistan, Donald Trump was working on season seven of Celebrity Apprentice.”

“And since when is strength about the chest-pounding and the loud-mouthed guy at the end of the bar?” he asked. “The strongest people I know are not the loudest people—they’re the ones who have the deepest sense of who they are and what they value and what they care about. And one of those people, by the way, one of the strongest people I know is my husband, Brad Pitt.”

With that line, the camera cut to Buttigieg’s actual husband Chasten, who was seated in the studio audience next to Ellen DeGeneres’ wife Portia de Rossi. Ironically, Trump also referenced Pitt in his latest rambling rally Thursday night, calling him a “little wise guy” for making a pointed impeachment joke during his Oscars acceptance speech.

Later in the episode, which will air in full on Friday, Buttigieg answered a series of lightning-round questions from DeGeneres including which fellow Democratic candidate he would like to be stuck on a deserted island with (Bernie Sanders) and how he would rate his college classmate Colin Jost’s impression of him on Saturday Night Live on a scale from one to 10 (6.5).

Buttigieg also had a message for Judge Judy Shiendlin, who recently came out in support of Mayor Mike Bloomberg: “I would like to file an appeal, and I would like to enter [into] evidence the content of the Las Vegas debate.”

Applauding that answer, DeGeneres said, “I learned a lot.”