CNN’s Chris Cuomo sits down with South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg for pre-debate interview

Pete Buttigieg tells Chris Cuomo that Trump is playing his supporters for “suckers.”

“I’m not scared of this president,” Buttigieg said in a CNN interview. “I mean, this a guy who was working on season seven of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ when I was driving armored vehicles outside the wire in Afghanistan. I’m not afraid to take him on.”

Said Buttigieg of Trump’s technique with his base: “You know, the gift of this president is to take any energy that goes his way, even if it’s in the form of criticism, and turn it into a kind of food that he just grows off of and gets bigger. That’s the code that we’ve got to crack. And I think the way to do it is to name and confront everything that he does wrong, but then immediately go back to talking about the impact that we will have on voters’ lives.”