Fox’s Cavuto to Buttigieg: It Was Trump Who Said Republicans Weren’t Getting Help in North Carolina

CAVUTO: “But we also get a lot of misinformation, don’t we? We get people who say in North Carolina that if you’re a Republican, you’re not going to get help. If you’re a Democrat, you’ll get help. I would imagine that does a huge disservice to people working together and scares the bejesus out of others when they believe it.”

Buttigieg: “Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I worried about, the false claim that was going on, for example, that had people believing that if you got $750 in immediate help that you were never going to get anything else. You know, what if somebody hears that, they believe it and then they don’t apply for more aid that they could absolutely qualify for? So, you know, there are real costs and real consequences to that misinformation. But I also want to say, for the most part, we’ve seen a lot of responsible actors on both sides of the aisle saying that there’s no place for that misinformation. You know, I’ve been on the phone with senator, I was talking to Senator Rubio, in touch with Senator Rubio and talking to Senator Scott, and talking to mayors, governors of the states impacted by Helene. You would never know from the conversations we’re having which ones were Republicans and which ones were Democrats. When I was talking to the FDOT secretary, you would never know that his boss and my boss belong to opposite political parties. Right now you got a lot of people pulling together, working to get the job done for people, regardless of how you voted, just based on what you need.”

CAVUTO: “Well, Donald Trump said that about North Carolina. Republicans not getting help, Democrats getting help, that was Donald Trump.”

Buttigieg: “Yeah, and I think that’s really unfortunate because it’s just not true. We’ve got thousands of people in all of the areas that have been affected. And that’s just the federal response alone. You know, whether we’re talking about somebody from the military who’s been deployed to help or somebody from our Federal Highway Administration, you know, they’re — they’re not checking whether they’re in a red county or a blue county, they’re checking what’s going on with the bridges and who needs comms help and what the immediate needs are and how we can be helpful. So, look, I get it’s October. I get there’s a lot of politics going on, but you know, what has inspired me is to see so many people working together across different lines, including the state, federal, county lines that are out there tearing down barriers, getting rid of red tape because everybody has a job to do.”