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I have not always been the biggest fan of Pete “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg. I thought the way he conducted his 2020 presidential primary campaign was craven. He made his name in a shrewd way, sure, but at the expense of pushing the party away from the kinds of populist ideas it now regrets not embracing.
That’s in the past, though. Right now, American democracy—and The Democrats—need Mayor Pete.
As of Monday night, the Trump administration says it is putting a “pause” on federal grant disbursements in order to make sure they accord with Donald Trump’s priorities. This sounds boring and technical but amounts to shutting down a huge swath of the country’s business (in addition to seemingly being unconstitutional given that Congress is supposed to have control of the national budget).
Potentially impacted activities, according to early coverage, include cancer research, disaster reconstruction, meal deliveries to homebound seniors, and child care at facilities that receive Head Start funding—but one of the big problems at the moment is that even experts aren’t sure what the two-page Office of Management and Budget memo announcing the “pause” means. (Two whole pages! Don’t tire yourselves out, guys.) Any entity that relies on federal funding—schools, charities, local governments, transit systems—might be at risk of missing payroll or shutting down activities. (Update, 1:45 p.m.: The White House has issued another short memo which says the pause should not apply to any program which provides “direct benefits to individuals” and that other programs can be approved and resume quickly.)
In a case of solid comic timing, the shutdown news began to spread at about the same time that NBC News was going live with a piece on congressional Democrats’ plan to ignore the “noise” that Trump’s boundary-pushing generates in order to focus its rhetoric instead on issues like “the cost of living,” “border security,” and “community safety.” Suffice it to say that staying chill and talking about “community safety” might not be what Democratic representatives’ constituents need or want from them right now.
The next problem, though—as we discussed Monday re: the price of eggs—is that Democrats don’t control the House or Senate. They do not have leverage over something else Trump wants that they can use to force him to back down on the “pause.”
What they face is fundamentally a communications challenge. Until the general public gets mad about what is happening, moderate Republicans are not going to worry about losing the next election because they shut down cancer research in order to investigate whether it supports “Marxist equity” and “transgenderism.” (This is seriously what the OMB memo says that federal agencies must review during the pause.)
But the public can’t get mad about what is happening until it finds out what is happening, something that is increasingly hard to count on in an era of fragmented, partisan, personality-driven media.
Who, then, should Democrats deploy to tell the people this bad news? Nominally, their most important figures, and thus spokespeople, are congressional leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But caucus leaders aren’t selected to their positions because they’re excellent communicators. They’re selected because members of their parties trust them to guide legislative strategy and lead fundraising.
Hakeem Jeffries is boring. Chuck Schumer, though he has in fact snapped to action to announce a nationwide legal challenge to the spending freeze, is not going to go viral on TikTok or a gamer-oriented streaming show hosted by someone named, like, Bront Von Zondenberg. Democrats need a national spokesman on the payroll for times like these.
This is where the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and secretary of transportation should enter the picture. Among the up-and-coming communicators who appear to be ready to take a step forward in their party during Trump’s second term, Buttigieg may be the best at appearing on camera to describe the Democratic position on a given issue in a way that is factual, sounds like common sense, and lasts as long as the typical social media video clip. As secretary of transportation, part of his job was to explain why and how federal regulation of the aviation industry could make the average person’s day-to-day life better—although, in the case of air travel, maybe the way to put it is “make the average person’s day-to-day life less of a nightmare.” This is pretty much exactly the skill set needed to explain on television and social media why something called “impoundment” involving “the Office of Management and Budget” is an urgent concern.
As of Tuesday morning, too, Michigan—where Buttigieg now lives—has a Senate seat coming open in 2026 that he might be interested in. It could be a win-win for everyone, except the cancer cells.
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