Andrew Yang: I Am Donald Trump’s ‘Kryptonite’

Presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang (D) on Thursday declared that he is President Donald Trump’s “kryptonite.”

In an interview with NPR’s “On Point” program, Yang said Trump has not name-checked him because he does not want to mess with Yang or his “Yang Gang,” which one writer described as a “new crew of political outlaws riding roughshod over the 2020 Democratic primary.”

“I want to point out that I am one of the only candidates that he has not touched on Twitter. And the reason for that is that he’s a bully and he knows I’m better at the internet than he is,” Yang said. “A lot of the people online that create memes and whatnot have converted to the ‘Yang Gang.’ So he hasn’t touched me because he knows I’m not the candidate he wants to mess with.”

Yang also pointed out, as Breitbart News has noted, that Trump revealed at a campaign rally that the “only thing” he worries “about is that some total unknown that nobody’s ever heard of comes along” and gets the nomination.

“But I truly am his kryptonite. He even said in a rally in West Virginia a number of months ago, he said he can’t wait to run against the Democrats. The only thing he’s worried about is that some new figure comes out of nowhere, and I’m that figure,” Yang said. “He runs most effectively against people that are part of the D.C. establishment, and I am not.”

Yang revealed that he had never even considered running for president until a “narcissist” like Trump shocked the world in 2016:

It was Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, where I’d spent the previous six years running a nonprofit, Venture for America, that I’d founded that helped create thousands of jobs in places like Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Birmingham, New Orleans. And I was stunned by what I saw in the rest of the country where automation had decimated communities, had eliminated 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. And then Donald Trump won in 2016, which to me was a giant red flag. It was a, ‘Stop what you’re doing. We just elected a narcissist, reality TV star as our president.’ And tens of millions of Americans were desperate enough to think that that was the right move. And to me, it was clear that this is the manifestation of this economic transformation that we’re in the midst of, that, for whatever reason, our politicians are not discussing — the elimination of these 4 million manufacturing jobs will now migrate to retail. And people who are listening to this are seeing Main Street stores close around them every single day. Call centers, fast food and then eventually hit truck driving, and being a trucker is the most common job in 29 states. There are 3 1/2 million truck drivers in the U.S.

And so I had no intention of running for president at any point. My wife laughs about it because in some ways I make a lousy politician. But Trump wins. I say, ‘OK, this is a straight automation story — that we’re in the third inning of the fourth industrial revolution. No one’s talking about it. We’re scapegoating immigrants for problems that immigrants have next to nothing to do with.’ When you’re in that position, you say, ‘Well, how can I, wake up America to the fact that this is a huge transformation we’re in the midst of?’ Then we need to start addressing and start solving the problems in the right timeframe, given that we’re five to 10 years away from robot trucks hitting the highways.

Yang has been attracting plenty of former Trump supporters at his rallies, and he told NPR that that humor is the best way to take on a “bully” like Trump.

“Humor is the best antidote, because the problem is that he seems like a bully, and then if you stand up and say, ‘That’s divisive,’ and it’s not very effective,” Yang added.