In two recent interviews, Pete Buttigieg zinged Christian conservatives who stand by Trump despite his sexual misconduct.
In a FOX News interview published Friday, Buttigieg called out Christian Trump-supporters:
“I’m old enough to remember when Republicans talked a lot about character in the Oval Office. And I’m a little bit puzzled that some leading figures on the religious right can look at somebody who has the track record that this president has on everything from the boasting about sexual misconduct to the payoff to somebody he’s having an affair and believe that that person ought to be the moral as well as the political leader of this nation. To put it mildly it seems inconsistent.”
Of course, Buttigieg is referencing the Access Hollywood tape released on October 2016 in which Trump boasted, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…. Grab them by the pussy.” After the recorded comments went viral, religious conservatives excused them away by bolstering Trump’s Islamophobia and anti-abortion support.
Similarly, religious conservatives said Trump’s politics, not his pre-Presidential behavior, mattered more when it was revealed that Trump paid bisexual adult star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in 2016 to stay quiet about their 2006 extramarital affair.
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Related: Franklin Graham just cited the Leviticus “death to gays” verse when discussing Buttigieg
In a separate Friday interview on the radio show of Christian conservative Hugh Hewitt, Buttigieg mentioned Vice President Mike Pence’s use of religious beliefs to justify discrimination:
“I don’t know what’s in his heart. If you’re in public office and you advance homophobic policies, on some level it doesn’t matter whether you do that out of political calculation or whether you do it out of sincere belief. The problem is, it’s hurting other people.”
Early into Buttigieg’s campaign for the presidency, he publicly criticized Pence by calling him a “cheerleader for the porn star presidency.” He also asked if Pence “stopped believing in scripture when he started believing Donald Trump.”
