Pete Buttigieg declared President Donald Trump is “not unstoppable” after Indiana Republicans rejected the administration’s push to redistrict their state.
The former United States Secretary of Transportation addressed the Indiana Senate defeating the proposed gerrymandering during Thursday’s episode of “All In With Chris Hayes.”
“It’s absolutely extraordinary,” he said to MS Now’s Chris Hayes. “You know, the vice president said they have to pick a side and they did. Now, to be clear, they didn’t stop being Republicans. This is a conservative state. These are conservative legislators, but they figured out that the right thing to do, and for them, the smart thing to do was to say no to the White House. No to Donald Trump. And no to JD Vance.”
Per Buttigieg, this likely wasn’t an easy decision for Indiana lawmakers, noting the pressure must’ve been huge for them.
“So, imagine having a day job, being a part-time legislator, and you get a phone call from the president of the United States,” Buttigieg went on. “You get an in-person visit from the vice president of the United States. You got the speaker of the house in Washington working the phones. That pressure is enormous and they said no. It’s an extraordinary thing.”
Buttigieg cited political organizing as part of the reason the Indiana Republicans stayed true to their beliefs and didn’t follow Trump’s orders.
“You know, a big part of how Trumpism works is to make you feel totally disempowered, to make him feel inevitable,” he continued. “And yet the clear takeaway from this is he is not unstoppable and you are not without power. A whole bunch of people stood up, rallied in the state house, made those phone calls. The exact kind of old-fashioned political organizing things that some of us asked, ‘Does this still matter? Does this still work?’ It clearly had an effect, stiffening the spines of these Indiana Senate Republicans, who, in the end, had this vote and it wasn’t even close.”
Buttigieg expressed similar sentiments during his Wednesday evening appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” in which he noted that the president’s power will likely collapse “first within his party and then more broadly in the country.”
He added: “They’re doing this because they’re thinking ahead because they are aware of something we know as a fact is true, but we have trouble actually picturing, which is that a day will come when Donald Trump is no longer active in American politics.”
Watch Buttigieg’s commentary on the matter above.
“All In With Chris Hayes” airs weeknights at 8 p.m. ET on MS Now.
