Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang recently made a controversial Twitter comment — at least amongst his fans — that suggested the United States should avoid prosecuting President Donald Trump after his presidency. He urged people to focus on winning the 2020 election and solving the problems that got Trump elected — which he believes is job loss in the manufacturing sector due to automation.
Not long after Yang made the comment Thursday, he spoke to Fox News to clarify it.
“If you look around the world, one pattern that America should seek to avoid is prosecuting past leaders and presidents and imprisoning them. That’s something that America has never fallen into and that’s the way I would hope that we proceed with me in the White House.”
During the same interview, Yang commented on Trump’s recent ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos and his comment that he would still accept dirt on his opponents from foreign sources — even after everything his administration went through during Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference.
Yang said “it’s simultaneously both shocking and unsurprising. And it certainly lends credence to the fact that he was both open [to] that sort of thing during the 2016 election. So it’s very distressing to the American people.”
But Yang remained firm in his belief that the goal should be on getting Trump out of office in 2020, and highlights that this is what he’s working to accomplish.
When pressed about whether House Democrats should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, Yang said that it’s an issue Congress must decide on its own while he focuses on “beating him in the ballot box in 2020.”
Yang recently used Twitter to reveal that he believes political polls underestimate his support. He highlights the fact that most of these polls are still conducted with landlines, although he admits that this is still a channel he must work to reach people through.
As The Inquisitr reported, most major media polls conducted by outlets like CNN and Fox News rely on traditional phone methodology to create random samples of Americans. In addition, response rates for phone polls in 2018 was just 6 percent, suggesting that they are not an accurate way to obtain a representation of American opinions.
But Politico claims that moving polls into the online landscape is more complicated than it seems, as national panels are too small for surveying individual states. Mark Blumenthal, a pollster and co-founder of the website Pollster.com, said that this challenge is especially problematic for political campaigns and advocacy groups that want to create samples of American opinions in smaller states as well as below the state level.