Washington Examiner Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s political future will likely take an “enormous hit” following the recent Southwest Airlines disruptions, further showing his “incompetence.”
“I think this is gonna be an enormous hit to Buttigieg. As you know, obviously, he was a presidential candidate. I think that there’s been a string of incidents in which he has proven himself incompetent,” Gurdon said Friday on Fox Business’s Cavuto Coast to Coast.
“He’s a very ineffective transportation secretary, just as he is a very ineffective presidential candidate [and], frankly, an ineffective mayor before that,” he added.
BUTTIGIEG CHASTISES SOUTHWEST AIRLINES FOR ‘UNACCEPTABLE’ HOLIDAY TRAVEL DISASTER IN LETTER
Gurdon explained that despite Buttigieg’s letter to the airline, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has been slow to respond to crises in the past. He brought up the leave he took right as the supply chain problems worsened amid the coronavirus pandemic and as Russia continued to invade Ukraine as an example.
“He took two months of paternity leave at the height of the supply chain problems, and he just sort of went AWOL,” Gurdon stressed.
“I think that with this Southwest problem, this transportation problem, and the airline problem of the last week or more — is something that has been experienced by so many people flying or expecting relatives, etc., that Pete Buttigieg’s incompetence is now just widely known,” he added.
The Department of Transportation hasn’t given much but “lip service,” he said, adding that actions such as the fines levied in November against airlines were seen by critics as the department just trying to make things look better “but not actually doing what makes things better.”
But I would want to stress that [lawmakers on] the Left … want people to think that government can simply fix this by imposing fines and that sort of thing. And it is true that Southwest completely screwed up,” Gurdon explained.
“[But] they received $7 billion out of the $54 billion bailout that airlines got in the pandemic,” he added, questioning the continued problems.
Gurdon recognized that people purchase tickets from airlines, such as Southwest, for the price.
“What all these people [who have been] stranded all over the country in the last several days have been doing, essentially, they are paying for the fact that everybody buys cheap. They don’t buy convenient, they don’t buy easy reimbursement, etc.,” he noted.
“We have airlines operating on very narrow margins despite everybody thinking that the prices are high. … We buy tickets very cheaply, and to some extent, what we got just now is the price of that,” Gurdon said.
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When asked if America has learned its lesson from this fiasco, Gurdon said, “Probably.”
“We’ve probably learned a lesson. I think that the airline Southwest is perhaps even ready for the scrapheap,” he quipped.
“But I don’t think that we’ve learned to the extent that we’re gonna change this. … I don’t think that’s going to change, and I expect we will have more screwups,” Gurdon added.
