Pete Buttigieg stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday. He give his immediate thoughts on Donald Trump’s 99-minute address to Congress, but also threw in one shot below the belt.
“Let’s remember, despite what you heard tonight, [Trump] came in with just under 50 percent of the vote,“ Buttigieg said. ”He won, I’m not disputing that. But the smallest popular vote margin since Nixon.”
Buttigieg added coyly, “I wonder how he feels about something that important being that small in his case.”
“To be smaller than Tricky Dick, gives one pause,” Colbert added.
Buttigieg is hardly the first Democrat to make this sort of joke. Former President Barack Obama, at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, joked about Trump’s “obsession with crowd sizes,” while making a hand gesture implying it wasn’t the crowds Trump was obsessed with.
For the rest of his interview with Colbert, however, Buttigieg kept things clean.
“The State of the Union, I think, is really confused about why our leaders are talking about renaming things on a map instead of getting the price of eggs down,“ Buttigieg argued.
Buttigieg summed up Trump’s speech as, “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.”
That, according to Buttigieg, is part of the reason why he doesn’t think Trump’s declining approval ratings will improve any time soon.
“There’s a good chunk of people who voted for him, even though they didn’t like him, because they thought maybe he was going to make them better off,” Buttigieg said.
He argued that Trump has failed to live up to that assumption so far, which is why he’s already losing support.
“He will continue to,” Buttigieg said, “if he’s not addressing our problems.”
