Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took Trump's VP pick, J.D. Vance (R-Project 2025), to task on Bill Maher's show. I don't like Bill Maher, but Buttigieg is good at being interviewed by unlikable people, like on Fox News, for example. Each time, he's reaching out to a different category of voters instead of living comfortably in a bubble. Buttigieg explained how Vance had gotten ahead in politics, and he nailed it.

"Look, we're from the same generation," Buttigieg said. "We're both from the Midwest, different parts of the Midwest."

"I know a lot of guys like J.D. Vance," he continued. "I've run into a lot of guys like him. Not so much when I was growing up in Indiana."

Explaining why Peter Thiel is Vance's backer, he said, 'It's super simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.'

"So, I knew a lot of people like him when I got to Harvard," he continued. 'I found a lot of people like him who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead. And five years ago, that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican. So that's what he was."

"Talked about how he was unfit, how he was cynical," he said. "Called him an opioid, which is kind of a weird thing to say about a person. But I mean, for somebody whose identity is that they're connected to Appalachia, which has an opioid crisis, that really is the darkest thing you could possibly say about Donald Trump, at least in public."

"Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that he's the greatest guy since sliced bread," he continued. "And I actually watched this exact same process with somebody else I got to know in my days in the Midwest, which was my former governor, Mike Pence, who I watched start out as an evangelical Christian who cared about rectitude and family values, and then get on board with a guy who was mixed up with a porn star, make excuses for him so that he could have power."

"And then he did," he continued. "He got four glorious years, I guess, as Vice President of the United States."

"And it ended on the West Front of the Capitol with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government," he added. "So I guess, maybe not as a politician, but as a human being, what I'll say is that I hope things work out a little bit better for J.D. Vance than they did for Mike Pence."

That last line was quite a burn, but Buttigieg is good at that, as he very calmly slices and dices MAGA Republicans during every interview. Vance is in this for Vance, just like the felon puts himself over America's best interests. They belong together.