Buttigieg on Trump: ‘Senate is the jury today, but we are the jury tomorrow’

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg argued Sunday that American voters will soon serve as Donald Trump’s jurors ahead of the President’s anticipated acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial this week.

“As upsetting as what’s going on in the Senate is, the thing that I’m always reminding voters of, especially in these closing days of the Iowa caucuses, is that yeah, the Senate is the jury today, but we are the jury tomorrow and we get to send a message at the ballot box that cheating, lying, involving a foreign country in our own domestic politics — not to mention abuse of power more broadly and (a) bad administration — that that’s not okay, that we can do better,” Buttigieg told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

The comments from the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor come two days after Senate leaders struck an agreement to hold the final vote to acquit Trump on the two articles of impeachment on Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET. The agreement was made after the Senate on Friday voted to block any witnesses from being called in the trial, which Democrats had been aggressively pushing for.

Buttigieg said Sunday that he thinks Republican senators “know better” and that “the only shock waves that will reunite them with their conscience is a thumping at the ballot box for Donald Trump and those who supported him.”

“That’s why it is so important right now, beginning tomorrow even here in Iowa, that we have a candidate, a nominee, a campaign that can deliver that, that can bring together that American majority that is ready for something completely different from a presidency like Donald Trump’s,” he said.

On Monday, this year’s nominating process for the Democratic Party will kick off when voters in Iowa participate in the state’s caucuses. Buttigieg, who is among the 11 Democrats vying for the party’s nomination, said Sunday he will support the eventual nominee.

But pressed by Tapper on whether he thinks former Vice President Joe Biden, among the top Democratic candidates in the race, could beat Trump if he became the nominee, Buttigieg noted what he sees as disadvantages in a candidate like Biden.

“If you look at the lessons of history, over the last half century, every time that we have won — every time my party has won the White House, it has been with a candidate who is new in national politics, who doesn’t work in Washington, or at least hadn’t been there very long, and who is opening the door to a new generation of leadership,” he said.

The former mayor has previously criticized Biden, including last week, when he accused both the former vice president and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, another top Democratic contender, of being too focused on the past rather than the future.

“I hear Vice President Biden, saying that this is no time to take a risk on someone new,” Buttigieg said Thursday. “But history has shown us that the biggest risk we could take with a very important election coming up is to look to the same Washington playbook and recycle the same arguments and expect that to work against a president like Donald Trump, who is new in kind.”

“Then I hear Sen. Sanders calling for a kind of politics that says you got to go all the way here and nothing else counts,” he added at the time. “And it’s coming at the very moment when we actually have a historic majority, not just aligned around what it is we’re against, but agreeing on what it is we’re for.”