Pete Buttigieg has always balanced levity with seriousness — a rhythm he brought again to Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday night, where a conversation about holiday travel, aviation safety, and rising health care premiums unfolded against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s increasingly theatrical approach to transportation policy.
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The former transportation secretary walked onto the stage to warm applause as Kimmel teased the enduring national inability to pronounce his last name. Buttigieg took the ribbing in stride. “I think when you’ve been mayor, that just always stays,” he said when asked why people still call him Mayor Pete years after his two terms as South Bend, Indiana’s chief executive. Later, after Kimmel played a montage of political and media figures butchering his surname, Buttigieg offered a half-shrug, half-quip: “There are times when politics is like middle school, and it’s just like that’s my name. Don’t wear it out, I guess.”
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Kimmel soon brought up a viral moment from the day before: a highly publicized stunt at Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C., where Buttigieg’s successor, Sean Duffy, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. competed in a pull-up contest as part of a rollout for the Trump administration’s “healthier airports” initiative. The scene, a pair of Cabinet officials doing chin-ups in a terminal, sparked fascination, bewilderment, and not a small amount of criticism.
When Kimmel asked whether Buttigieg felt jealous he hadn’t thought of installing “jungle gyms in the airport,” he cut through the absurdity with characteristic restraint. “I love exercise. I love air travel. Putting them together is not really something I would really think to do,” Buttigieg said, before pivoting to the deeper issue. “Of all the problems you could be trying to solve with the aviation system right now, why are you doing that while dismantling the protections we put in?”
In the former secretary’s telling, the pull-up stunt wasn’t just a harmless curiosity — it was a metaphor for a transportation apparatus drifting toward spectacle while the guardrails he built are quietly eroding. He described how the Trump administration has undone some of the most significant policies he put in place: automatic refunds for controllable delays, penalties against airlines after mass strandings, transparency rules that forced carriers to reveal on-time performance and fees, and the disability protections that treated wheelchairs as essential mobility aids rather than misplaced luggage.
The stakes, as Buttigieg framed them, are not bureaucratic but human. He spoke with particular urgency about wheelchair users, explaining that when airlines break a customized chair, “it’s as if they broke your legs.”
That exchange illustrated a dynamic increasingly visible in Washington: a widening gulf between the flamboyant optics favored by Trump-era officials and the quotidian, often invisible work required to keep the nation’s transportation infrastructure functioning.
With millions of Americans preparing to fly for the holidays, Buttigieg, whose four-year-old son wants a fire truck rocket ship that goes into space for Christmas, reminded viewers of the marvel of flight. “Flying remains the safest form of travel,” he said, calling it an “amazing civilizational achievement … to be propelled through the sky with flammable liquids in a tube going almost the speed of sound.”
But he added that the system requires constant staffing and stewardship. “We need more air traffic controllers for sure,” he said, noting that he had handed his successor “an air traffic control workforce that was growing and not shrinking” for the first time in decades. Now, he admitted, “I don’t know if that’s still true.”
When asked whether he feels a lingering sense of responsibility during travel disruptions, Buttigieg smiled. “That muscle memory takes a while to fade away,” he said. “Realizing that I’m just a passenger … If the flight is delayed, I can just get another cup of coffee or a beer, depending on what time it is.”
Watch Pete Buttigieg’s interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! below.
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