Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg (/ˈbuːtɪdʒədʒ/ BOOT-ih-jəj;[a][1][2] born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former naval officer who is currently serving as the 19th United States Secretary of Transportation. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the 32nd mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020, which earned him the nickname "Mayor Pete".
Buttigieg is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Oxford, attending the latter on a Rhodes Scholarship. From 2009 to 2017, he was an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve, attaining the rank of lieutenant. He was mobilized and deployed to the War in Afghanistan for seven months in 2014. Before being elected as mayor of South Bend in 2011, Buttigieg worked on the political campaigns of Democrats Jill Long Thompson, Joe Donnelly, and John Kerry, and ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic nominee for Indiana state treasurer in 2010. While serving as South Bend's mayor, Buttigieg came out as gay in 2015. He married Chasten Glezman, a schoolteacher and writer, in June 2018. Buttigieg declined to seek a third term as mayor.
Buttigieg ran as a candidate for president in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, launching his campaign for the 2020 United States presidential election on April 14, 2019. He became one of the first openly gay men to launch a major party presidential campaign.[b] Despite initially low expectations, he gained significant momentum in mid-2019 when he participated in several town hall meetings and television debates. Buttigieg narrowly won the Iowa caucuses and placed a close second in the New Hampshire primary.[4][5][6] By winning Iowa, he became the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus. Buttigieg dropped out of the race on March 1, 2020, and endorsed Joe Biden the following day.
President-elect Biden named Buttigieg as his nominee for Secretary of Transportation in December 2020. His nomination was confirmed on February 2, 2021, by a vote of 86–13, making him the first openly gay Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.[c] Nominated at age 38, he is also the youngest Cabinet member in the Biden administration and the youngest person ever to serve as Secretary of Transportation.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg demonstrates how a breakdown of trust has brought our nation to the brink of disaster—and how its restoration for all can reclaim America’s future.
In a century warped by terrorism, Trumpist populism, systemic racism, financial collapse, and a global pandemic, trust—in our institutions, in each other, and in the American project itself—has precipitously eroded. We are now experiencing the disastrous consequences of a “crisis in trust,” writes Pete Buttigieg, former presidential candidate and best-selling author of Shortest Way Home. In this arresting, impassioned account, Buttigieg contends that our success—or failure—in confronting the greatest challenges of the decade will rest on whether we can effectively cultivate, deepen, and, where necessary, repair the networks of trust that are now endangered, or for so many, never even existed. Interweaving history, political philosophy, and affecting passages of memoir, Trust is an urgent call to foster an “American way of trust.”