Pete Buttigieg slams Ron DeSantis ad with “oiled-up shirtless bodybuilders”

Out Secretary of Transportation slammed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s (R) presidential campaign for an extremely anti-LGBTQ+ video it produced. The video contained images of shirtless buff muscle men inter-spliced with statements about how DeSantis is hurting LGBTQ+ people in his state.

“I’m 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,” Buttigieg snarkily said on CNN’s State of the Union this past Sunday, “and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space.”

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She called him a “hypocrite” for using government-owned planes to travel for work.

“Which is, again, who are you trying to help? Who are you trying to make better off? And what public policy problems do you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?” he continued.

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“You know, we’re focused as an administration on how to get things done that make people better off,” he said. “And I just don’t understand the mentality of somebody who gets up in the morning, thinking that he’s gonna prove his worth by competing over who can make life hardest for a hard-hit community that is already so vulnerable in America.”

Buttigieg was discussing a video that was posted by the DeSantis War Room Twitter account, which is used for campaign communications. The video compared DeSantis to Donald Trump on LGBTQ+ issues and criticized Trump for being too supportive of LGBTQ+ people, citing offhand comments he has made in the past decade while ignoring his policy record on LGBTQ+ issues.

To wrap up “Pride Month,” let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it…

pic.twitter.com/FT7LdW4vls

— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023

DeSantis is currently in a distant second place in 2024 Republican primary polling, getting an average of 21.5% support in recent polls, according to RealClearPolitics. Trump is first with an average of 52.4%.

Also in the interview, Buttigieg criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the ruling issued last Friday that said that creative business owners could break their state’s antidiscrimination laws if they say that serving LGBTQ+ people violates their sincerely held religious beliefs.

The case did not involve someone who was being investigated for discrimination. Instead, the plaintiff – Lorie Smith – said she was worried about the possibility of being found to have discriminated if she were to start making wedding websites professionally and refuse LGBTQ+ clients.

“I think it’s very revealing that there’s no evidence that this web designer was ever even approached by anyone asking for a website for a same-sex wedding,” Buttigieg said. “Matter of fact, it appears this web designer only went into the wedding business for the purpose of provoking a case like this.”

He compared the ruling to state laws taking away LGBTQ+ rights, especially transgender youth’s rights. Many of the laws have sought to ban trans girls from participating in school sports, even as lawmakers admit that they don’t know of any trans students in their states participating in school sports.

“I think there’s something in common between this Supreme Court ruling and what we’re seeing happening in state legislatures across the country, which is kind of a solution looking for a problem,” Buttigieg said.

“In other words, sending these kinds of things to the courts and sending these kinds of things to state legislatures for the clear purpose of chipping away at the equality and the rights that have so recently been won in the LGBTQ+ community,” he continued. “And when they’re doing that, it’s at the expense of so many other issues that Americans are asking for relief and support on.”