A President Andrew Yang would want to leave the past in the past.
While some of his rivals in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary want to investigate President Trump if they win the White House come November, Yang struck a more conciliatory tone on Sunday – saying that “you have to see what the facts are on the ground.”
“If you look at history around the world, it’s a very, very nasty pattern that developing countries have fallen into, where a new president ends up throwing the president before them in jail,” Yang said on ABC’s “This Week.”
He added: “That pattern unfortunately makes it very hard for any party to govern sustainably moving forward with a sense of unity among their people, and so to me, America should try to avoid that pattern if at all possible.”
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While Yang did not give a hint on whether he would pardon Trump – who was impeached by the House in December on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – the entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate has been critical of his fellow Democrats in the past for the focus on impeachment. During the December PBS NewsHour/POLITICO debate, Yang said that both Democrats and the media were “obsessed over impeachment.”
Yang’s comments on Sunday come one day before the Iowa Caucus, the first test in the 2020 primary season. While Yang is not polling near the top of the pile, he has surprised many with his dark horse presidential bid as he has jumped from near obscurity to the debate stage over more well-known former candidates like Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke.
Yang currently sits sixth in Iowa at 3.8 percent, behind former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, according to RealClearPolitics.
But Yang said on Sunday that he expects to “surprise a lot of people” in Iowa.
“We think we’re going to surprise a lot of people on Monday night, George, and we’ve got a ton of support in New Hampshire,” he said. “I can’t wait to take this vision to the rest of the country.”