Biden’s Secretary of Transportation isn’t really into the day-to-day parts of his job. In fact, it seems that he would much rather be a figurehead who shows up for photo opportunities, based on a recent CNN interview with Mayor Pete himself.

“Buttigieg says what he’d rather be doing is trips like Monday’s: Opening the first new airport terminal in Kansas City since Vice President Spiro Agnew was there for a ribbon cutting … celebrating the groundbreaking on a record-busting $4 billion electric vehicle battery plant in DeSoto, Kansas, and talking transportation programs with students at the University of Missouri,” the outlet reported.

“Those events are the things Buttigieg thought he was signing up for with the Cabinet job,” CNN added.

Instead, though, he has had to deal with crises such as supply chain hiccups, rail strikes, aviation woes, and that whole toxic train spill in East Palestine, Ohio, that has upended the lives of thousands.

Buttigieg’s message for his haters is simple: He knows how to shop better than they do, and they’re a bunch of frauds, he implied during the CNN interview.

“It’s really rich to see some of these folks – the former president, these Fox hosts – who are literally lifelong card-carrying members of the East Coast elite, whose top economic policy priority has always been tax cuts for the wealthy, and who wouldn’t know their way around a T.J. Maxx if their life depended on it, to be presenting themselves as if they genuinely care about the forgotten middle of the country,” Buttigieg bemoaned to CNN.

“You think Tucker Carlson knows the difference between a T.J. Maxx and a Kohl’s?” he threw in for good measure.

Buttigieg’s media therapy blitz also included a sit-down session with twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The two discussed unfair criticism from naysayers.

“When you read about your biography, your accomplishments, you’re often described as a trailblazer,” Clinton said to Buttigieg at the event hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative University. “You are the first openly gay Cabinet member. You’re the youngest person to ever hold the office of the Secretary of Transportation. You’re one of the youngest people to make a serious bid for the presidency. So there’s no doubt that along the way being the first often requires knocking down some barriers, some misconceptions.”

Buttigieg replied, “Yeah, I mean, again, I’m humbled to have a word like ‘trailblazer’ used when I’m sitting next to you and knowing all the cracks you put in that glass ceiling.”

During that conversation, he assured voters that he wasn’t going to “complain about any frustration associated with coming to an agency and having work to do every day and finding that you’re dealing sometimes with a noise machine that seems to have little to do with your day-to-day work and a lot to do with perceptions about your real or perceived role in presidential politics.”

“It would be very indecent of me to complain about that sitting next to you,” he added, which drew a cackle out of Clinton.

There's a "noise machine that seems to have little to do with your day-to-day work and a lot to do with perceptions about your…role in presidential politics," Pete Buttigieg tells Hillary Clinton.

"It would be very indecent of me to complain about that sitting next to you." pic.twitter.com/jJo1d8pGue

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 6, 2023

What has not seemed to cross Buttigieg’s mind is that he may be criticized because he stinks at his job, focuses on nonsense issues such as equity over merit, and has a general smarminess about him that no photo-op can fix — not because of his sexual orientation.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

U.S. intelligence officials suggest an unnamed “pro-Ukranian group” carried out last September’s attack on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea, which link natural gas from Russia to Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark reported severe damage to the pipelines in September as natural gas spewed toward the surface of the Baltic Sea.

According to a New York Times report, officials said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or the national government were not involved in the attack and declined to disclose additional information surrounding the new intelligence obtained. The anonymous officials cited by the Times offered no specifics on the shadowy group they said blew up the pipeline, but insisted the attack did not involve the U.S. or United Kingdom.

Last month, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in an extensive report on Substack, alleged that U.S. Navy divers planted remotely triggered explosives on the pipeline under cover of training exercises over the summer. The White House and the CIA denied Hersh’s report.

The Daily Mail reported National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby refused to comment on The Times piece in a briefing call to reporters on Tuesday, saying the investigations into the “sabotage” of the pipeline by Germany, Denmark, and Sweden are ongoing.

“There are three investigations going on right now,” Kirby said. “And they aren’t done,” adding the information from those reports has not been released to the public.

The twin Nord Stream pipelines have been at the center of geopolitical strife since before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago. Months into the conflict, Russia nixed shipments through Nord Stream 1 as a retaliatory measure against Western Europe, while Germany blocked the adjacent Nord Stream 2 from initiating shipments days before the war started.

Just before the war began, President Joe Biden warned “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2” if Russia crossed the Ukrainian border and insisted to a journalist that “we will be able” to bring an “end” to the system.

The commander-in-chief initially waived sanctions against the Russian-owned company behind Nord Stream 2, although he reimposed sanctions shortly before the invasion started.

After the Nord Stream 2 was destroyed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the phenomenon a “tremendous opportunity” to end European reliance on Russian energy supplies. Even though the pipelines were not pumping natural gas, protesters in Germany had been calling for the energy flow to resume as electricity prices increased more than twentyfold. Crippling the pipelines eliminated the possibility of Germany lifting sanctions in time to import natural gas for the winter.

Ben Zeisloft contributed to this report.