President, governor, state treasurer: all of these are titles which Pete Buttigieg has hoped to attain, but never reached. The former Secretary of Transportation spoke about his political career at the 2025 Texas Tribune Festival in a session with Jeff Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
Having served as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana since 2012, Buttigieg ran to challenge Trump for the presidency in 2020, but gave up his bid for Democratic nominee to endorse Joe Biden, who triumphed in the primaries. After winning the general election, Biden appointed Buttigieg to his cabinet as Secretary of Transportation.
“I told Pete that in my mind, he’s now an off-duty politician, so I’m not going to ask about national rail policy or the air traffic controller staffing issues,” Goldberg joked. “We’re going to do 40 minutes on the Newark air traffic controller situation.”
Although Goldberg launched the conversation with quips about Buttigieg’s time overseeing aviation, he soon transitioned to deeper social and political issues he described were plaguing the country. The 2024 reelection of Donald Trump featured heavily in the discussion.
“A guy like Donald Trump, a movement like a kind of protoauthoritarian nationalism, doesn’t find fertile ground in places where things are working,” Buttigieg said. “Our inheritance as a country isn’t making it reasonable to get through everyday life, to get up in the morning and get in your car and get to work where you’re going to be paid enough to live.”
Goldberg also noted that the journalism world he worked in is now competing with online personalities and accounts. Media was a focus of the last three elections, and Buttigieg blamed algorithms for promoting false information that pushed many Americans deeper into their personal ideology and helped Trump rise to power.
“Southbend Tribune, even Fox News, if we actually caught them saying something wrong and and we showed it, they would, as a matter of editorial integrity, adjust that,” Buttigieg said. “That doesn’t happen obviously in not just social, digital media, tweets and that sort of thing but in many of the podcasts that have replaced the traditional media that we have depended on… You instead have that editorial function being played by an algorithm. The algorithm’s job is not to find things that you need to know. The algorithm’s job is to find things that’ll keep you staring at the screen.”