Pete Buttigieg Lays Into Homophobic Ron DeSantis Campaign Ad: Video

Out U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to task Sunday morning for the GOP presidential hopeful’s anti-LGBTQ+ ad against former President Donald Trump.

The ad, which mocks Trump over his supposed pro-LGBTQ+ stances, has been roundly criticized, especially for parts used from a speech Trump gave after the massacre at Pulse nightclub left 49 people, mostly LGBTQ+, dead. It also tried to depict DeSantis as strong with the use of shirtless bodybuilders, including Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale) from American Psycho.

“To wrap up ‘Pride Month,’ let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it,” reads the DeSantis tweet captioning the advertisement.

In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash, Buttigieg condemned the ad.

“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. And just get to the bigger issue that that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space — which is, again, who are you trying to help?” Buttigieg said “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?”

Even the Log Cabin Republicans, the country’s largest LGBTQ+ Republican group, called out the ad.

Speaking with Bash, Buttigieg referenced trips he’s made in support of infrastructure initiatives to Kentucky and North Dakota and compared them to the ad, saying that it’s working on those sorts of issues and projects that led him and others to pursue work in the administration.

Buttigieg said, “These are the kinds of problems that most of us got into government, politics, and public service in order to work on, and 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.”

It’s not the first time Buttigieg has called out the Florida governor. He did so plenty of times since DeSantis signed the states’ “don’t say gay” law in 2022.

In an interview earlier this month, Buttigieg said he couldn’t reach DeSantis to discuss Department of Transportation issues in Florida with him.

“I’ve never heard from this governor, and it’s not because I’ve never called him. We’ve never spoken. What I will say is we’ve done a lot of good work with the Florida Department of Transportation,” Buttigieg told Time. “We try to work around and through all that to just get stuff done. A huge amount of energy and effort is being wasted in these dumb fights. And that’s really unfortunate. It’s policy waste in order to achieve political benefit or perceived political benefit.”