Donald Trump Jr says Pete Buttigieg only got his job because he’s gay in pathetic little rant
Donald Trump Jr’s rant against the transport secretary has been watched more than 400,000 times (Getty/ Alex Wong)
US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg has been criticised by Donald Trump Jr, who has claimed he only got his job because he’s gay.
It follows a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system outage on Wednesday (11 January), which saw flights grounded for several hours across the US.
According to flight tracker FlightAware.com, as of 3pm GMT yesterday 4,948 flights within, into or out of the US had been delayed, while 868 had been cancelled.
In response to the incident, Trump Jr recorded a rambling video rant, which has so far been viewed more than 400,000 times.
In it, he repeatedly claims Buttigieg only has his transport role because he “checked the box”.
He said: “[This is] a blow to people who get really important jobs with no experience, to basically check off some identity politics boxes, folks.
“Mayor Pete, mayor of the small town, in Indiana – ‘he is a gay American, so he should just run for president. And we are going to get behind it.'”
He continued: “And guess what, when you don’t get that, if you get in line with the Democrat party, we will give you a major cabinet position – where it doesn’t really matter.”
Later in the rant he states: “It does not seem in the age of equity, remember, not equality.
“Because equality means of opportunity, not of outcome. In the age of equity, there seems to be some scary stuff going on at the FAA.
“Guess what, when you are 36,000 feet in the air, maybe you just want a competent person there. Not someone who checked the box, like to me, Mayor Pete did.”
But Trump Jr wasn’t the only Republican to take aim at Buttigieg due to the grounding of the planes, with Republican Colorado representative Lauren Boebert also taking Twitter to blame Buttigieg.
She wrote: “Every plane in America is currently grounded due to a system error. Mayor Pete, bravo. This is what happens when you hire clueless liberals for jobs they aren’t qualified to do.”
Following the situation being rectified, Buttigieg took to Twitter to explain the outage.
He stated: “FAA has determined that the safety system affected by the overnight outage is fully restored, and the nationwide ground stop will be lifted effective immediately.
“I have directed an after-action process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.”
In a follow-up tweet he addressed concerns about the fault being the result of a cyber-attack.
He wrote: “At my direction, FAA is continuing its system review. Preliminary work has traced the issue to a damaged database file, with no evidence of a cyber-attack.
“FAA will continue its work to further pinpoint the sources of this issue and steps to prevent it from occurring again.”
Pete Buttigieg’s run for president
In March 2020, Buttigieg dropped out of the Democratic race to unseat Donald Trump. He was heralded by many as the first gay man to run for the presidency, but that title actually goes to Republican Fred Karger, who campaigned in 2012.
When asked if he would ever give it a second shot should Joe Biden decide not to seek a second term, he dodged giving a direct answer.
In an interview with Anderson Cooper he said: “Where my head is at is how do we spend the better part of a trillion dollars in infrastructure funding, accountable, on time, on task and on budget,” he told Cooper.
“It literally doesn’t leave any room for me to be thinking about politics.”
Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, are no strangers to receiving homophobic abuse.
In November, Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused Buttigieg of lying about being gay. The politician’s husband was quick to hit back.
“This kind of rhetoric is easy. It’s so easy to attack people and to go on your talk show and fire people up about something that’s not actually happening,” Chasten told CNN.
Buttigieg also hit back at Fox News host Bret Baier after he attempted to catch him out on a trip he took to the Invictus Games in April 2022.
PinkNews has contacted the FAA for comment.
