This past weekend on CNN, Pete Buttigieg — former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, former Secretary of Transportation, and current professional cable news guest — sat down with Jake Tapper to deliver his verdict on the Iran war.
“This is clearly amateur hour at the Pentagon and in the White House,” Buttigieg announced, without apparent awareness of what those words sound like coming from him specifically.
He called Trump “unfit to be the Commander-in-Chief.” He said the administration was treating the war “like a video game.” He accused Trump of “raising money over the bodies of America’s war dead” because a campaign fundraising email featured a photograph from a dignified transfer ceremony.
It was quite a performance from a man whose signature professional achievement was abandoning his post for a multi-week paternity leave while the American supply chain was actively collapsing and Americans were scrambling. Thanks for nothing Mayor Pete!
Let us spend a moment with Pete Buttigieg’s record as Secretary of Transportation, since he has appointed himself the standard-bearer for competent crisis management.
Under his watch, American ports backed up so severely that dozens of container ships sat anchored offshore for weeks unable to unload. Baby formula disappeared from store shelves while his department struggled to explain why moving goods from Point A to Point B had become a national emergency. A train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing a chemical plume that prompted evacuations, and Buttigieg’s initial response was to take several days before visiting — and to note, when pressed, that “there are many train derailments.”
There are many train derailments. From the Secretary of Transportation.
He presided over an agency responsible for roads, rails, aviation, pipelines, and ports — and his department’s most memorable contribution to the national conversation was being unable to explain why things weren’t moving. Now he is on CNN explaining why things aren’t moving correctly in a military theater.
Buttigieg’s specific critique was that the Trump administration failed to anticipate that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the strikes. “He went off and launched a war without planning,” Buttigieg told Tapper.
This is a genuinely interesting critique from a man whose department did not anticipate that COVID supply chain disruptions, combined with a surge in consumer spending, might result in port congestion. Or that removing baby formula from the market without a domestic replacement ready might cause a shortage. Or that a railroad running hazardous chemicals through a small Ohio town might eventually have an accident worth monitoring.
Trump’s military, in sixteen days, has destroyed 6,000 Iranian targets, eliminated 90 percent of Iran’s missile launch capability, ended the reign of Ayatollah Khamenei, and conducted the most successful opening phase of a Middle Eastern military operation in a generation. The Strait of Hormuz is a real problem — and the United States has already authorized the largest emergency oil reserve release in IEA history to address it. It’s also actively taking out Iranian ships and proxies who are trying to close the Strait on a daily basis.
That is what “amateur hour” produced.
Pete Buttigieg is running for something — possibly Michigan governor, possibly the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, possibly just a CNN contract. Every television appearance is a resume entry. Every “unfit” soundbite is a fundraising email waiting to happen.
The irony of accusing a political opponent of fundraising off the war dead while spending a Saturday morning on national television audition-taping your next campaign is apparently lost on him.
He called it “video game” treatment of a real war. Sixteen days in, the real war has achieved what no American president has managed in decades: the destruction of Iran’s offensive military capability and the elimination of the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism.
Pete Buttigieg’s trains were never on time. But sure — tell us more about amateur hour.
