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WASHINGTON – Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg condemned Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday over a campaign video that criticizes former President Donald Trump for his past support for LGBTQ Americans.
“I just don’t understand the mentality of somebody who gets up in the morning, thinking that he’s going to prove his worth by competing over who can make life hardest for a hard-hit community that is already so vulnerable in America,” Buttigieg said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.
The video, released on the DeSantis War Room Twitter account on Friday, the last day of June’s LGBTQ Pride Month, has been criticized by gay-rights groups and even some Republicans as bordering on homophobia.
It shows footage of Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention saying he would do everything in his power to protect LGBTQ citizens. He had been pledging protection from terrorist attacks weeks after the shootings at the Pulse Nightclub, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at that time.
The video also highlights “LGBTQ for Trump” T-shirts sold by the former president’s campaign and his past comments saying he would be comfortable with Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic decathlete who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, using any bathroom at Trump Tower.
Shifting gears, the video also shows images of DeSantis, who is seeking the GOP nomination for president, accompanied by dark, thumping music and promotes headlines about legislation he signed into law restricting transgender rights. The images are spliced together with footage of muscular, shirtless men and several Hollywood actors, including Brad Pitt, seen wearing a leather mask from the movie “Troy.”
Asked by CNN to respond to the video, Buttigieg, who is gay, said he was going to leave aside “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space, which is, again, who are you trying to help.”
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Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a rival of Trump and DeSantis in the 2024 GOP primary, also slammed the video as part of a teenage “food fight” between the two Republicans.
“It certainly doesn’t make me feel inspired, as an American, on the Fourth of July weekend to have this type of back and forth going on,” Christie said on CNN. “It is wrong to be doing it. And it’s narrowing our country and making us smaller.”
Former Texas Congressman Will Hurd, who entered the race for the GOP presidential nomination in June, criticized the video and said candidates should concentrate on other issues.
“I wish they would focus their attacks on war criminals like Vladimir Putin, not my friends in the LGBTQ community,” Hurd said. “It is 2023. We should be talking about how do we embrace our differences.”
The Log Cabin Republicans, in a statement issued Friday, called the video “divisive and desperate” and said that DeSantis’ “naive policy positions are dangerous and politically stupid.”
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on Twitter @mcollinsNEWS.
Contributing: Associated Press
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