Pete Buttigieg may have left the Cabinet — and grown a little scruff — but he hasn’t lost his edge.
Appearing this week on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart podcast released Thursday, the former transportation secretary — now a private citizen, dad wrangling twin toddlers, and part-time policy professor — spoke with the kind of candor rarely possible from the Cabinet room.
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Beard first, though.
“Pete, look at you with the scruff,” Stewart teased as Buttigieg appeared on screen. “You’re not working for a month or two, and you’re growing out the beard now.”
@weeklyshowpodcast“They don’t view an honest discussion of policy as something they need to slow down and do.” We’re digging into the Trump team’s logic, or lack-there-of, with @Pete Buttigieg. #TheWeeklyShow #politics
“You started it,” Buttigieg quipped, noting it was rare in his Cabinet days to go more than a day without shaving. After a family vacation with husband Chasten and their three-and-a-half-year-old twins, he decided to let it grow — at least for now.
But what Buttigieg wanted to talk about wasn’t facial hair — it was President Donald Trump’s economic wrecking ball and what it’s doing to ordinary people’s lives.
On Trump’s tariff shock: “That actually matters”
Buttigieg blasted Trump’s recent tariff chaos — a jarring series of moves that sent markets plunging, only for Trump to later pause many of the tariffs after already setting the global economy on edge.
“I grew up in northern Indiana. I live in Michigan. I get what the wrong kind of trade has done to the industrial Midwest,” Buttigieg said. “But tariffs are supposed to be a tool... in order to get some kind of advantage for the people you serve. This is not that.”
Referencing recent reporting that conservative think tanks had found basic math errors in Trump’s tariff calculations, Buttigieg added, “That actually matters when trillions of dollars depend on, first of all, what you do — and secondly, how you do it.”
For Buttigieg, this isn’t academic. He warned the stakes are real for everyday Americans — not just stock tickers.
“Investments are not just numbers on a page,” he said. “These are decisions that very quickly go to our everyday lives... whether you are hoping as a construction worker that a project is gonna go forward near you... This is not a game.”
And what keeps him up at night isn’t just prices rising — though he reminded listeners that “a tariff is a tax.”
“The other thing I’m really watching is the jobs part,” he said. “Now a recession has gone from being viewed as pretty unlikely a year ago... to being viewed as better than a coin flip.”
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He added: “For so many people, this is not just something that’s of interest to you because you like watching the news. This is people’s lives.”
On governing by chaos: “This Is Chaotic On Purpose”
Buttigieg argued that the Trump team’s disinterest in coherent policy isn’t incompetence—it’s strategy, and it’s about power.
“There’s a logic here,” he said. “If you make it completely chaotic, then the only organizing principle is the man himself.”
“The more messy you make it... the more it’s total chaos except you get to the man. You get to the king,” Buttigieg said. “That’s a terrible way to make policy. And it’s terribly unfair.”
He continued: “If you believe that the press will hold you accountable, then you know that when you don’t get something right, you have to talk about it, think about it, learn from it, do better next time. If, on the other hand, you think you can just beat your chest and say it’s all fake news... then why bother going through the finer points of making sure that all the places you’re putting tariffs on are actually countries or checking your math once or twice before you throw the markets into total turmoil, right?”
On the Signal scandal
Buttigieg also weighed in on the Trump administration’s Signal scandal — after The Atlantic reported that top officials coordinated U.S. military strikes in an unsecured group chat and accidentally included a journalist.
“This is the highest level of fuckup imaginable,” Buttigieg posted on Instagram. “These people cannot keep America safe.”
On Stewart’s podcast, he didn’t rehash the profanity but underscored the danger.
“They send the battle plans to the wrong guy on the wrong text app, and they randomly put a tariff on a country that doesn’t have anybody. It’s not even a country; it’s just an island with some penguins,” Buttigieg said. “These screwups are not something that causes introspection.”
On life after Washington: “I guess I should feed the dog now”
Buttigieg, now spending more time at home in Michigan, reflected on the whiplash of going from a Cabinet role to being a regular dad again.
“This is a department with 55,000 people... and then one day it’s 12 o’clock, and you’re done, and you just like, 'I guess I should feed the dog now,'” he said. “It’s a strange feeling.”
Buttigieg recently announced that he would not be running for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat or the governor’s mansion, leaving many to speculate that he is setting himself up for a presidential run in 2028. These days, he’s in the van negotiating toy disputes between his kids or — true to form — stopping by road construction projects to chat with workers.
“It was one of the projects that we funded,” he said. And while he’s enjoying the family time — and the beard — he’s clear-eyed about what’s happening in Washington.
“All of us are... just very, very alarmed about what’s happening around the country,” he said.
