Presidential candidate Andrew Yang believes he can defeat President Donald Trump in a general election because he is “better at the internet than he is,” according to a Thursday Politico magazine feature.
Politico reporter Michael Kruse followed Yang during a recent South Carolina campaign swing in which Yang did the “Cupid Shuffle” that later went viral. Yang, like Trump and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, has used the internet to go around the establishment media that have done their best to ignore and marginalize the outsider candidate whose campaign is not filled with their favored retread consultants that they often rely upon for “insider” information. And Yang reportedly believes he and his “Yang Gang” will run circles around Trump online.
Yang, who has ridiculed Trump for being a fat slob, reportedly also said that he would defeat Trump by using humor that would make Trump “seem ridiculous” and “diminish him” and dismiss his arguments by “making him seem like the buffoon and joke that he is.”
Yang reportedly told crowds that he would be “ice” to Trump’s “fire.”
An NPR reporter who followed Yang across New Hampshire and has been following Trump revealed this week that Trump supporters often tell her that Yang is the only other candidate they would consider voting for in a general election. And Politico also found former Trump supporters at Yang’s South Carolina rallies:
They had driven the hour or so up from Savannah, Georgia, and both of them said they had voted for Trump but would not be doing it again.
Ditto for their other friend. “He’s an asshole,” Jordan Snipes said of the president. “And he hasn’t done anything he said he was going to do.”
They were members, they all said, of the Yang Gang now.
I asked if there were others like them where they’re from.
“Most of our friends,” Snipes reported
“We all saw a problem, and that’s why we elected Donald Trump,” he told me. “Because he was saying he was going to go in and he was going to drain the swamp. He was a larger-than-life figure, you know? We all knew that there was a problem. We just didn’t know what that problem was. But then, when you listen to Andrew Yang, you realize: Oh, yeah, it is automation—it’s not immigrants. It’s automation. We’re all losing our jobs. We’re all being phased out. I’m an ex-landscaper. I just saw yesterday they’ve got a mower that just goes and mows your yard, just like a Roomba, you know, does your house.”
And what’s he do for work now?
“This is what we do,” he said. “We follow Andrew Yang full-time.”
He doesn’t work for the campaign, but …
“This has become my passion. There is nothing more important than getting this man elected,” he said, breaking down his video equipment.
“I’m tired of politicians. I don’t want a politician. I want somebody who’s going to tell me the fuckin’ truth, tell me what’s going on, and then provide something that’s actually going to impact my life! Since I’ve been an adult, there’s not been onepolitician that has directly impacted my life, but I promise you that freedom dividend and putting $2,000 a month into my household would directly impact my life. I mean, game over.”
He wasn’t finished.
“People are so disillusioned,” he said. “Donald Trump? He was the WWE superstar guy. You know, he was going to take his metal chair into Washington, and he was just going to use it on everybody. We were finally going to be working like we were supposed to be working—and I’ve only seen the country get more and more divided. And then when you have Trump acting like he’s acting, I can’t support that, bro’. And then there’s a lot of people in the center who are like me who are moving over to Andrew Yang because we don’t like what we see. We don’t like what Trump has done to the country. He’s only divided us more and more. So now we actually have some solutions and a guy who’s talking about solutions—so, like, let’s get this guy in, because he makes too much damn sense!”
Trump, while speaking about dreaming against running against the far-left Democrats, revealed that the “only thing” he worries “about is that some total unknown that nobody’s ever heard of comes along.” Yang’s supporters think the entrepreneur could be that “total unknown.”
“There’s a reason he hasn’t touched me,” Yang reportedly continued. “Because he knows I’m the wrong person to touch. His supporters are all coming my way. … I’m peeling off Trump supporters right and left.”