Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Mike Pence’s ex-chief of employees hit again on the White Home on Monday after the Biden administration demanded the previous vice chairman apologize for “homophobic” remarks remodeled the weekend about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Whereas talking on the black-tie Gridiron dinner on Saturday, Pence mocked Buttigieg for taking “two months’ maternity go away” after adopting twins together with his husband in 2021. Whereas Buttigieg was out of the workplace, the previous vice chairman continued, “1000's of vacationers had been stranded in airports, the air site visitors system shut down, and airplanes almost collided on our runways.”
“Pete is the one particular person in human historical past to have a baby and everybody else will get postpartum melancholy,” Pence joked.
In an announcement issued earlier on Monday, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slammed Pence for his phrases, deeming them “offensive and inappropriate.”
“The previous vice chairman’s homophobic joke about Secretary Buttigieg was offensive and inappropriate, all of the extra so as a result of he handled girls affected by postpartum melancholy as a punchline,” Jean-Pierre mentioned. “He ought to apologize to girls and LGBTQ folks, who're entitled to be handled with dignity and respect.”
Marc Brief, Pence’s aide and former chief of employees, then tweeted, “The Biden administration ought to spare America the fake outrage.”
“The hypocrisy is very wealthy,” he continued, “contemplating their very own Secretary of State Antony Blinken joked that he yearned for ‘the previous days’ when ‘Jews did all of the work.’” (It was not instantly clear when or if Blinken, who's the son of Jewish mother and father and the stepson of a Holocaust survivor, mentioned this.)
In one other tweet, Brief sniped, “The White Home can be sensible to focus much less on placating the woke police and focus extra on financial institution failures, planes almost colliding in mid-air, prepare derailments, and the continued provide chain disaster.”
Brief didn't reply to Buttigieg’s husband, who on Monday afternoon addressed Pence in a tweet of his personal. “An trustworthy query for you, @Mike_Pence, after your tried joke this weekend,” Chasten Buttigieg wrote above a photograph of the transportation secretary holding one in every of their newborns in a hospital.
“In case your grandchild was born prematurely and positioned on a ventilator at two months previous—their tiny fingers wrapped round yours because the displays beep within the background—the place would you be?”
After their untimely delivery, the Buttigiegs’ twins, Penelope and Gus, spent two weeks in hospital, finally growing the respiratory virus RSV. Shortly after, Gus’ situation deteriorated and he was positioned on a ventilator.
“Parenting is a number of issues, and a kind of issues is terror,” Buttigieg wrote in a Medium publish final 12 months. “You watch your toddler, sedated and surrounded by wires and tubes and displays and medical personnel coming and going always, and marvel how we may stay in a universe the place just a few weeks could possibly be all that a baby will get on this earth.”
Each youngsters finally recovered, and celebrated their first birthday in August.
Lis Smith, an aide who labored on Buttigieg’s unsuccessful presidential bid in 2020, known as Pence an “unambiguous asshole” on Twitter. On Monday, she informed Politico that his feedback had been “gross and hardly consistent with the upright, Christian picture he tries to mission.”