Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said the Trump administration is not providing the “leadership that we need to bring this country together” after Charlie Kirk was fatally shot last week.
During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Buttigieg was asked about President Trump’s video he posted on Truth Social after announcing Kirk’s death, where he said his administration “will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
Buttigieg responded that the White House is not doing what it can to “bring this country together.”
“We’re not getting the leadership that we need to bring this country together from the White House,” he said. “And in order to turn the tide of political violence, yes, we have to reject those who commit political violence. Yes, we have to reject those who celebrate or promote political violence. But also, in order to deprive political violence of its power, we have to reject anyone who would try to exploit political violence.”
Buttigieg argued that the U.S. response “cannot be for the government to crack down on individuals or groups not because of violence but because they challenge the government politically.”
“We need to have free and open political debate and a healthy political process in this country,” he continued. “And by the way, just like an overwhelming majority of Americans reject violence, an overwhelming majority of Americans, left, right, and center, believe that the government should not be cracking down on its political opponents because they are political opponents. Not in the United States of America. Not ever.”
Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old resident of Utah, is being investigated as the alleged gunman in the fatal shooting.
In the following days since the death of the Turning Point USA founder, Trump has continued to blame the “radical left” for the “rhetoric that is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
“I’d like to see it [the nation] heal,” the president said in an interview with NBC News last week. “But we’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.”
However, Buttigieg argued that “there is not a consistent pattern of left versus right among the shooters.”
“But there is a pattern where we see so many of these people are men, usually young men, who seem to spend more and more of their time in dark and twisted corners of the internet,” he added.
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