Pete Buttigieg warns Democrats can’t go back to status quo after President Trump

Republicans won the 2024 election through a strategy that included an enormous number of podcast appearances. Now, Democrats are debating their future election strategy, and a lot of the discussion is taking place on podcasts.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been talking for months on NPR and elsewhere about a Democratic party that’s more populist–attacking parts of the political system that don’t work for most people, and more loudly pushing back against the Trump administration. Rahm Emanuel, a longtime party leader, went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast and rejected some party orthodoxy on social issues. The authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have appeared on a stream of podcasts to promote their book Abundance, arguing that progressive policies have stood in the way of progressive government.

Pete Buttigieg is making his own pitch in one of NPR’s all-platform interviews. The past and possibly future presidential contender had a discussion that’s available as an Up First podcast episode, a video on multiple platforms, and on the radio during Morning Edition. In his conversation with NPR, Buttigieg warned that Democrats can’t, and shouldn’t, try to restore everything in the government that President Trump has broken this year.

“You’ve got an administration that is burning down so many of the most important institutions that we have in this country, which is wrong,” Buttigieg said in a Morning Edition interview in New York City. “It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was.”

Below are four key points from a wide-ranging discussion on where his party stands and what to do now.

The status quo wasn’t working

When Democrats took power in 2021, many viewed it as a restoration project: Repairing and strengthening the institutions that Trump had damaged. Buttigieg no longer sees that as a fully realistic or even desirable goal. The Democrats, he said, have been “too attached to a status quo that has been failing us for a long time.” That’s one of the reasons Buttigieg gives for the party’s defeat in 2024.

Now he talks about embracing change. “It is wrong to burn down the Department of Education, but I actually think it’s also wrong to suppose that the Department of Education was just right in 2024,” he said. “You could say the same thing about USAID. It is unconscionable that children were left to die by the abrupt destruction of USAID. Unconscionable. But it’s also wrong to suppose that if Democrats come back to power, our project should be to just tape the pieces together just the way that they were.”

In effect, he’s taking up former Vice President Harris’s campaign slogan from 2024 — “We’re not going back” —-and applying it to a completely different situation.

The furor over the Epstein files reflects a larger loss of confidence

“A breakdown in societal trust” is one of the reasons Buttigieg believes the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has such staying power. Many Americans don’t trust their government generally, and don’t believe assurances that the government has revealed all it knows about the financier and convicted sex offender who was connected to many of the wealthy and powerful, including his onetime friend Donald Trump, before his suicide in 2019.

President Trump’s aides promised great revelations from the Epstein files, and many Trump supporters proved unwilling to accept it when the Trump administration failed to deliver.

Buttigieg admits that Epstein “was historically more of an area of interest for the MAGA base” than for Democrats, but defends Democrats’ recent pressure on the president.

“You shouldn’t have to be a Republican or a Democrat to care about making sure there’s transparency on something as horrific as the abuses that happened. And to want to understand why an administration that promised to shed light on this decided not to,” Buttigieg said.

Buttigieg also answered our questions about another issue of trust, whether members of the past administration obscured President Joe Biden’s condition as he aged. The former transportation secretary insisted otherwise. “I told the truth, which is that he was old. You could see that he was old. And also, when it came to my ability to do my job and have my boss, my president, support me in that job, I always got whatever I needed from him, from the Oval Office.”

He wants to push back on “the politics of fear”

He says the fear of political retribution, or even physical violence, “is more real than at any point in my lifetime.” The fear of losing funding “is already impacting who gets invited to speak at a university or who gets hired at a law firm…. We can’t allow that” He added, “The thing about the politics of fear is the more you give into it, the worse it gets. The only antidote to a politics of fear is a politics of courage.”

Watch the beard for clues

In our video interview, we discussed a quirk of history. Before 1860, no president had a beard or mustache. From 1861 to 1913, nearly every president had facial hair. Then the trend passed, and no president in modern times has had facial hair.

Buttigieg has grown a beard since leaving office, and is now one of several potential presidential contenders with facial hair, joining others who range from Ted Cruz to J.D. Vance.

Could the beardless streak since 1913 soon come to an end? Buttigieg avoided saying if he would shave the beard to run in 2028 —and also avoided saying if he would run.