Pete Buttigieg appeared on Fox News Monday night and clashed with Martha MacCallum over President Donald Trump’s economic record prior to and during the coronavirus pandemic.

Buttigieg appeared with MacCallum right after Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh was on defending the president’s economic record.

The former mayor responded by remarking, “I guess he thinks we are all stupid.”

Buttigieg slammed Trump’s record and said, “If he’s trying to use the 2020 economy as an example of an economic triumph, he’s living on a different planet than the rest of us. The only reason those numbers are what they are is because it’s a partial comeback from the bloodbath that was the second quarter. We are still down as I think anybody knows.”

“Well, I think anybody would understand that obviously when you shut down an entire economy the way that we had to, it’s going to take a while to come back,” MacCallum responded. “Some would say that it’s come back two thirds from how far it was down. By any estimation from what happened, that’s a strong number… it’s not back where it was but we understand the world we live in too.”

Buttigieg hit Trump’s “mismanagement of the pandemic,” and MacCallum responded, “You can characterize that however you want. Anybody who was president was going to have to go through that economic dive and come back out of it.”

“Well, except in other countries it didn’t happen quite like that, did it?” Buttigieg asked.

“Well, we have the most diverse country in the entire world. We have a set of complex problems with our population, it’s a completely different environment,” MacCallum said.

“So we should settle for less? So we should settle for worse numbers?” Buttigieg shot back.

“Absolutely not,” MacCallum said. “All I’m saying is there’s only one way to know how they would’ve handled it and we don’t have two presidents at once.”

She brought up the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette endorsement of Trump, which praised him in particular on the economy.

Buttigieg again slammed Trump’s record on the economy compared to his predecessor Barack Obama’s.

You can watch above, via Fox News.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/3jRa4bI