Pete Buttigieg told a Fox News anchor that he didn’t disagree with Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, over Kelly’s assessment that his former boss was a would-be autocrat and a “fascist”.
Buttigieg went on the right-wing channel to spar with the network’s conservative hosts on Sunday, a realm where the Transportation Secretary has been particularly effective in championing the Biden-Harris administration’s record. As Trump was onstage in Kinston, North Carolina, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, faced Neil Cavuto’s questions.
Cavuto asked the secretary whether Kamala Harris could truly be “breaking bread” with Republicans if she and other Democrats were calling Trump a “fascist”. Buttigieg responded that Harris and others, including himself, were only agreeing with what Trump’s own top deputy was saying about the ex-president.
“I don’t think that Gen. Kelly is wrong. He knows Donald Trump much better than I do,” Buttigieg said. “I would not contradict General Kelly in his assessment of his former boss. Look, we’ve never seen a president where his own chief of staff and his own vice president won’t support him.”
Kelly’s description of Trump as an authoritarian figure came in an interview with The Atlantic this past month. To Buttigieg’s second point, both Kelly and former Vice President Mike Pence have refused to endorse the ex-president in the 2024 election, with Pence stating that Trump asked him to violate his oath of office.
Trump’s former chief of staff also told The Atlantic at the same time that his former boss praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, particularly Hitler’s generals, on several occasions. Kelly explained to the news outlet that he was so taken aback by the statement the first time he heard it that he initially did not believe what Trump had just supposedly said.
“‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” Kelly said he’d asked Trump, according to The Atlantic. “I said, ‘Do you mean the Kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’”
Trump’s team has denied this exchange ever took place and has characterized Kelly as a “disgruntled” former employee — Kelly’s relationship with Trump publicly turned negative during his time as chief of staff, and he resigned at the end of 2018.
Kelly is far from the only former top aide to the ex-president who has made such claims about his ex-boss; former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, another general, has given a similar characterization of Trump as an authoritarian.
A slew of Trump’s White House staffers have also come out against his third bid for the presidency, having left Trumpworld in disgust after the attack on the Capitol aimed at overturning the election results on January 6.
