"It's not that complicated": Pete Buttigieg on why a gay billionaire is backing JD Vance

In a segment of "Real Time with Bill Maher" at the start of the weekend, openly gay United States Secretary of Transportation and one-time presidential hopeful, Pete Buttigieg, was asked to lay out his thoughts on why Peter Thiel — gay billionaire and former CEO of PayPal — has supported JD Vance's political career thus far, despite Vance's anti-LGBTQ+ stance. "I know there are a lot of folks who say, 'What's going on with these Silicon Valley folks veering into Trump world with JD Vance, and backing Trump?'... Following Trump's announcement at the Republican National Convention that Vance is officially moving forward as his pick for VP, publications like USA Today did some digging on Vance's financial backers and found that his ties to Thiel go all the way back to 2011, when Vance was a student at Yale Law School and Thiel was a venture capitalist, going on to donate $15 million to support Vance's campaign to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. Using Mike Pence as another example of someone who he initially knew as having very different values than Trump, but embraced him in order to get power, only to be offered up as a sacrifice at the end when he held on to "the last shred of integrity he still had" during the events of Jan. 6, Buttigieg hopes for a better outcome for Vance's run as vice president, should his chosen team win.