Video: Fox News Host Laura Ingraham Takes Down Pete Buttigieg—'Creation of a Media Apparatus Desperate to Oust Trump'
Fox News host Laura Ingraham slammed Democratic 2020 contender Pete Buttigieg as a pawn of a "leftist" media hoping to take down President Donald Trump in 2020.
Comparing coverage of the South Bend, Indiana, mayor to that of President Barack Obama, she called him "a darling of metro lefties," and mocked liberal commentators for building up the "aura and the historic nature of the man" over his substance.
The host made the comments on Fox News' The Ingraham Angle Tuesday.
A native of South Bend, Buttigieg, 37, went on to attend both Harvard and Oxford universities. He has served with the Navy and traveled to Afghanistan in 2014. First elected as South Bend mayor in 2011, he began his second term in 2015.
Buttigieg, who is gay, married high school teacher Chasten Glezman last summer. He is a practising Episcopalian.
Calling his public image "carefully curated," Ingraham argued Buttigieg was really a "garden variety leftist."
"He's kind of calm and soft spoken for sure," she said, but he supports policies "that would sap our economic gains and take money out of the pocket of people who work, for government programs that don't."
Listing policies including the Green New Deal, single payer health plans and amnesty for certain "illegals," Ingraham continued: "He would upend the constitution to ensure that California and New York trump the views of heartland Indianans every time.
Homing in on Buttigieg's past criticism of Trump, she argued the media was using Buttigieg—a soft-spoken, married, Christian Midwestern—to appeal to "conservative family values" in a bid to take down the president. At an August 2018 Democratic event, the mayor called Trump "basically a disgraced game show host," according to the The Chicago Sun-Times.
"Beyond his boy scout demeanor and Mayor Pete schtick, Buttigieg is but another creation of the media apparatus desperate to oust Trump," Ingraham said. The media wants to "whip up the Democrat base, keep them excited and keep them engaged," she added. "Anything to divert voters attention from the growing 401(k)s, bigger paychecks and all that good news that happened because of Trump's policies."
Buttigieg has risen through the ranks of the crowded Democratic field, coming third place in a recent Emerson poll of the Iowa caucus. Buttigieg scooped up 11 percent of votes in the poll, ahead of rivals like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. The mayor was beaten only by former Vice President Joe Biden, who is yet to enter the 2020 race, and 2016 candidate Bernie Sanders.
On Monday, Buttigieg announced his team had raised more than $7 million dollars in the first quarter of 2019, explaining the breakdown of the figure in two videos on Twitter.
