96 | Rolling Stone | July 2019
PETE BUTTIGIEG[Cont. from 69]
and hurting you.... But you have control. You have
control over whether that bully makes you into a
worse version of yourself, or a better version.”
Someone in the crowd shouts what everyone is
thinking, about bullying and the current president.
“Sounds familiar!”
Buttigieg answers: “It really matters that we have
a president who doesn’t show that kind of behavior.
It’s one of the reasons I’m running for president.”
There are cheers, but Buttigieg steers the rest
of his answer far away from Trump. “When you’re
being bullied, somebody else is watching, and they
don’t know what to do, maybe they’ll laugh along
with the bully, because they’re... afraid too,” he says.
“So when you show that it doesn’t get to you, when
you show that you’ve got the bigger heart, there are
people who you won’t even realize are going to fol-
low your lead. You ought to think of yourself as a
leader, especially in that moment when somebody’s
trying to break you down.”
Moms and cynical reporters have tears running
down their faces.
Afterward, I ask Buttigieg if he thinks there is a
straight line from Trump to more kids in America
being terrorized. He looks at me as if I was a little
slow. “Of course,” he says. “Look at the way that hate
crimes have gone up on the watch of this president.
It matters what message comes out of the Oval Of-
fice, what style of leadership is projected. And what
we have right now is something that basically gives
voice to bullies and gives them cover. This isn’t just
a policy job, it isn’t just an administration job, it’s a
moral job.”
Buttigieg finishes speaking and disappears into
a crowd clamoring to touch him. The smile is still
there, but the campaign trail is a killer even for
thirty somethings. He looks dead tired. George Mi-
chael’s “Freedom! ’90” blasts from the speakers. The
Iowa caucus is still eight months away, but something
lingers in the air. Maybe it is something as corny as
hope. Maybe it is the possibility of awakening from
our national nightmare. For a moment, it does not
seem impossible that the man to lead us out of dark-
ness is a gay mayor with an unpronounceable name
and an actual heart.jackets to working men in Timber-
lands. Right now, a Buttigieg bridge to the black com-
munity doesn’t seem impossible.
P
ETE BUTTIGIEG’S FATHER DIED in January, just
as he was launching his presidential explor-
atory campaign. In his last days, Joseph was
on a ventilator, but father and son still talked poli-
tics. From a love of Joyce to heartfelt conversations
around the dinner table, Buttigieg was very close to
his parents; his mother still lives a few blocks away.
“One thing I learned from them is a sense of the
way big, big forces and little things interact,” says
Buttigieg. He says that there was some of his father’s
work he didn’t understand, but it didn’t lessen its im-
portance: “An idea that happens in a very theoretical,
abstract space, centuries later, winds up moving the
history of an entire country. That can happen in good
and bad ways. It’s how America got started, right?”
I ask him if the fresh tragedy gave him pause about
running, but he didn’t think about taking a pass.
“The medical advice that we were getting contem-
plated the question of whether it was worth being
more aggressive just so he could see more of this, in
pain,” says Buttigieg. “In the end, it wasn’t medically
right for him. A really important part of our last few
days together was him seeing this process play out.”
The process, Buttigieg has learned, involves end-
less air miles. There have been trips to L.A. to har-
vest lucrative political funds. An appearance at the
92nd Street Y in Manhattan, where he would prob-
ably be elected president by acclamation, had a line
two blocks long. Name a podcast, and Buttigieg has
been on it. But in the end, it’s about retail politics,
connecting to individual voters in Iowa.
“Running around the country to 18 different states
and feeling like you’re a front-runner may feel great,
but with the field this big, it gets back to this: Go beat
Biden in Iowa or take second,” Trippi says. “Do what-
ever that takes. Live in small towns in Iowa.”
It won’t be easy. While Buttigieg’s campaign her-
alded the recent hiring of close to 80 national staff-
ers, Elizabeth Warren already has 50 on the ground
in Iowa alone. He has a fundraising base in the Holly-
wood gay community, but in early-voting California,
he runs up against a home game for Kamala Harris.
Maybe that’s why there are signs that the cam-
paign is becoming more aggressive. In the coming
days, Buttigieg charges that Trump “faked a disabili-
ty in order to avoid serving in Vietnam.” This is in di-
rect contrast to the discomfort Buttigieg tells me he
had earlier about calling Trump a “chicken hawk.”
“It’s the whole Dr. King ‘Darkness cannot drive out
darkness’ thing,” Buttigieg says with a sigh. “It’s not
like I’m wracked with guilt for that decision, but I no-
ticed after that I thought, ‘I’m not sure that’s me.’ ”
Campaigns have a way of changing candidates,
and rarely for the better. But there are still glimps-
es of what you could call the Best Pete. The day after
his Ulysses shout-out in Des Moines, Buttigieg emerg-
es before 600 fans hanging from every beam and
cranny at Iowa City’s Wildwood Smokehouse & Sa-
loon. A young councilwoman begins her introduction
with “We are Gen X’ers, we are millennials, we’re the
micro generations,” and then welcomes Pete.
Buttigieg bounces up the steps and waves, look-
ing sheepish about the applause. Onstage, a support-
er plucks audience questions out of a fish bowl while
Buttigieg reminds Iowans, “We are lucky and un-
lucky enough to live in a moment of transition,” he
says. “Whatever we do now will decide... what the
next 40 years will look like.” He gets some strong ap-
plause, but nothing rapturous. And then comes the
question.
“Rebecca is 11 and wants to know, ‘Do you have
any advice about bullying?’ ”
The crowd goes quiet until Buttigieg locates the
girl up in the balcony. He makes eye contact and
tells her that just asking the question is brave and ad-
mits he had been bullied as a kid too: “Everybody
who’s different can be bullied, and the secret is ev-
erybody’s different in some way. You have nothing
to be ashamed of.”
He then asks her to have mercy for her tormentors.
“Remember that there’s a person in there too, proba-
bly a person who’s been hurt in some way,” he says in
a quiet voice. “Which is why they’re turning aroundHALSEY[Cont. from 45] not ashamed of talking about it
now.” Being committed isn’t a problem, she reasons,
it’s a way of responsibly dealing with one. “It’s been
my choice,” she continues. “I’ve said to [my manag-
er], ‘Hey, I’m not going to do anything bad right now,
but I’m getting to the point where I’m scared that I
might, so I need to go figure this out.’ It’s still hap-
pening in my body. I just know when to get in front
of it.” She quickly ticks off the people who work for
her, tallies how many kids they have. “Do I want to
hurt these people?” she asks.
Halsey says that the album she’s currently work-
ing on is “the first I’ve ever written manic.” Her fero-
cious writing process has been the same. “She’ll
be like, ‘OK, I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette,’ and
literally when she comes back the song is done,”
marvels producer Benny Blanco. But because she
“can’t sit still long enough to be productive,” she’s
ended up giving herself perspective, walking away
and then coming back to revisit songs weeks after she
initially wrote them. An eclectic product of her state
of mind, the album is a sampling of “hip-hop, rock,
country, fucking everything — because it’s so manic.
It’s soooooo manic. It’s literally just, like, whatev-
er the fuck I felt like making; there was no reason I
couldn’t make it.”
It’s also the first time Halsey’s work will not
hide behind a concept, though there is, she says, a
“motif.” “There’s a lot of exploration of l’appel du
vide, which is French for ‘the call of the void,’ ” she’d
told me back in L.A. “It’s that thing in the back of
our minds that drives us to outrageous thoughts.
Like when you’re driving a car and you’re like” —
she mimics cutting the wheel — “or you’re on top of
a building, and you’re like, ‘What if I just jump?’ ”
That, she says, is what her manic periods are like.
“You are controlled by those impulses rather than
logic and reason.”
It’s getting close to showtime now. Halsey’s stylist
comes in with a wig, black and blunt and a little tus-
sled. For a moment, Halsey considers it. Tonight she
will be performing her first album in its entirety, a
sonic time warp for her hardcore fans. Should she
have brought a blue wig, reminiscent of the Halsey
of her Badlands days? “No,” she says, finally. “I can’tkeep going back to that. Like, ‘This is the real me.’ I
can’t deflect.”
Halsey used to pity “Ashley,” but she doesn’t now.
“OK, point blank, here’s what it is,” she had said back
in her living room, the late-afternoon light and the
cigarette smoke bathing her in a soft-focus glow. “I
was a teenage kid who wasn’t real well-liked in high
school, and I was sold the dream that everyone was
going to like me, because I was going to be a famous
person.” But they didn’t, not everyone, no matter
what persona she tried. “That’s all it is. And now I’m
24, and I’m like, ‘Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.’ ”
And, really, it doesn’t. Outside the dressing room,
1,500 misfits with blue hair and tattoos and teen-
age angst they can tap into no matter what their age
are filing in to watch her sing a handful of songs she
wrote back when she was still being sold the dream.
They’ll sing along. They’ll scream her name. They’ll
cry, most certainly they’ll cry, thinking about the
bodies that lie next to them and the headlights in
their eyes. And in that moment, however fleeting,
the dream will be real, and the stories she tells will
be true, and no one will feel like they have to apolo-
gize for any of it.