In a rare display of frustration, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg called “bulls—,” literally, on a New York Times journalist during a recent endorsement interview.
The Times, which will announce its endorsement in the Democratic primary on Sunday, is posting videos and transcripts from the editorial board’s interviews with candidates. You can read the full transcript of Buttigieg’s 80-minute interview here. But below is an excerpt shown in the video above (in which “bulls— is bleeped out), with the Times’ annotations in parenthesis.
Binyamin Appelbaum: If I can put this question in a slightly different way, you’ve been on the front lines of corporate downsizing. You’ve been on the front lines of corporate price fixing.
Buttigieg: Whoa, whoa whoa, that’s, that’s, I’m sorry, that’s ——
Appelbaum: You’ve been on the front of our misadventures in foreign policy. You’ve had direct experience in many of the things that make a lot of young people very angry about the way that this country is operating right now. You don’t seem to embody that anger.
(In 2003, Mr. Buttigieg — then a junior at Harvard — spoke at an antiwar rally in Cambridge, Mass., protesting the invasion of Iraq. More than a decade later, in 2014, he served seven months in Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserves.)
Buttigieg: So the proposition that I’ve been on front lines of corporate price fixing is bulls—. Just to get that out of the way.
Appelbaum: You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices.
Buttigieg: No, I worked for a consulting company that had a client that may have been involved in fixing or was apparently in a scandal. I was not aware of the Canadian bread pricing scandal until last night.
(Mr. Buttigieg’s campaign has maintained that he only recently heard of the bread price-fixing scheme and while he was working with Loblaws focused on price cuts more broadly across the grocery store chain.)
