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Pete Buttigieg: “I think it is functionally closed now.”

Featuring: Pete Buttigieg, Democratic | Former Secretary of Transportation, Former Mayor of South Bend | National

Pete Buttigieg: The Left's Identity Crisis, Wealth Tax, 2024 Mistakes, Plans for 2028

Published October 30, 2025 | Video Starts at 40:24

I think that he is right to draw attention to the problem of the border and that it is important to have a secure border. I don't believe it was true that it was exactly open before. I think it is functionally closed now. But I would agree that the last administration didn't do enough and didn't do enough early enough by the border. Yeah, yeah. And why do you think Biden looked the other way? (40:24–40:27)

CLAIM

Asserts that the border is currently functionally closed.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Buttigieg

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“In the four years I was secretary, we had about 4 billion passenger implantments... zero commercial airline crash fatalities.”
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“The federal government literally invented the Internet.”
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“Less than 1 out of 10 [House seats] is considered to be seriously competitive.”
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“Every day 100 to 150 people die on our roadways to car crashes and vehicles driven by humans.”
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“Republican policies tend to favor people who are wealthier.”
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“Democrats have been extremely concerned about wealth and income inequality.”
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“The President of the United States [Trump] doesn't like being criticized by a comedian and has the head of the FCC...threaten them.”
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“A public health emergency that killed a million Americans.”
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“The wealthiest are paying too little tax.”
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“This is a program to get EV chargers deployed by 2030.”
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“We had a fund called nevi... about $7 billion to buy down the difference, to subsidize or just outright build those chargers.”
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“Most of the chargers would go in in 2026, 2027, but well ahead of 2030.”
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“We made a conscious decision to insist that the chargers be made in America.”
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“We need more funding for [FAA infrastructure upgrades]... to upgrade the technology.”
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“We launched a contract, Verizon as a contractor... a multi-year, multibillion-dollar IT contract.”
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“That's things like basic research, that's things like filling in gaps, especially on network effects like broadband EV charging networks.”
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“For it [the transition to electric vehicles] to be made in America, for it to happen as quickly as we wanted, and for it to reach people who…”
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“I just want to make sure people who are really well off do their part to pay into a system that has helped them to thrive.”
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“We took apart the small government that I was in charge of. It was about a $300 million operation, and put it back together and found that…”
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“The debt path we're on is not sustainable.”
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“For too long you've heard the message from Democrats is basically debt doesn't matter or there's no such thing.”
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“The Laffer curve has collapsed empirically and it just doesn't work that way.”
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“There is such a thing as the debt. It does matter.”
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“I literally did put out a plan which I balanced every single spending back when I was running for president in 2020.”
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“We can't just slash a trillion bucks from what the wealthiest people are paying again and again and then call this a sustainable budget.”
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“The vast majority of the benefits of those tax cuts went to the wealthiest.”
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“Because these districts are so gerrymandered.”
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“Historically, there's no evidence that any republic can reach this level of [inequality] to hold onto it and continue to be a republic.”
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“There's actually a bipartisan agreement among the American people on what to do [about immigration].”
Pete Buttigieg: The Left's Identity Crisis, Wealth Tax, 2024 Mistakes, Plans for 2028 | Uploaded October 30, 2025 | 38:33-38:38
“I don't believe it was true that [the border] was exactly open before.”
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“The last administration didn't do enough and didn't do enough early enough by the border.”
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“I think it was the 80s the last time we had an actual bill to fix [immigration].”
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“I think he [Trump] thrives on a politics of fear. I think chaos is good for him.”
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“We're seeing just how extreme [immigration policy] has gotten at a time when...we bring together the people who believe in these simple…”
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“We've got an economy and a society that exerts a pull, that actually needs more people, like, for our demographics and our economy to work.”
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“There are a lot of things about Trump's immigration policy I think are wrong, destructive, possibly illegal, too.”
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“If you take the amount of money that it costs to do a full scale military deployment in American city and you just used it on improving…”
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“I have heard personal, direct examples of people who are in some cases U.S. citizens or in other cases here illegally, who no longer think…”
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“The infrastructure bill was proclaimed dead many times in the summer of 2021 before it got done.”
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“One person decides if he's running again. One person decides at the end of the day on the campaign strategy.”
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“The Department of Transportation actually already had responsibility over some things, and we did commercial space licensing.”
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“30, 40,000 people a year [die] on our roadways.”
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“Human drivers [are] killing more than 100 people a day on our roads.”
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“Some of these technologies right now already are safer than human beings.”
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“The pie did get bigger, but the rest of that promise didn't come true.”
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“We're already at a level of concentration of wealth and power that no republic has ever survived.”
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“I think that's where good policy can make a difference.”
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“I was a 29 year old mayor that a lot of people wrote off and didn't take seriously and was able to get big things done.”
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“I expect that he'll win and then we'll all get to see.”
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