Presidential candidate Andrew Yang on Tuesday evening warned Democrats that impeaching President Donald Trump will allow the president to dominate the news cycles and prevent Democrats from presenting a “positive vision” of America that voters can rally around in 2020.
Yang told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has “been on board with impeachment ever since it’s been put forward” but warned Democrats that they have to “face facts where you still are looking at a republican majority in the Senate and you need a super majority for impeachment to actually be successful.”
“So the odds are still very high that it is going to run aground in the Senate and it is going to end up being a very polarizing issue for many Americans,” Yang said.
Yang said “a lot of oxygen has gotten sucked out of the room for impeachment” and “the more we focus on Donald Trump even if it’s in the context of impeaching him, it’s a lost opportunity for us to present a new positive vision that Americans can get excited about, because when we’re talking about Donald Trump, we are losing, even if it’s talking about impeaching him.”
Other Democrats running for president like Julian Castro have argued that after all of the talk and noise about impeachment, Democrats must impeach Trump to prevent him from claiming a “clean bill of political health” in 2020.
“If we don’t move forward with impeachment against Donald Trump, what Trump is going to say in the fall of 2020 is, ‘You see, these folks that are always trying to investigate me, they talked a big game about impeachment. You know why they didn’t move forward with it? Because they didn’t have any evidence. I didn’t do anything wrong,’” Castro has said. “So basically, you’re going to give him a clean bill of political health.”
Yang said if the Democrats impeach Trump, “the thousandth verification that Donald Trump is Donald Trump is not going to change minds out there in America.”
“So to me, the challenge is to solve the problems that got him elected in 2016, and then help the country move forward in 2020,” he said. “And for me as someone running for president, I again need every opportunity to make my case to the American people that we can do much, much better than Donald Trump, and that we need to solve the problems that got him elected, primarily the fact that we’re going through this fundamental economic transformation that blasted away millions of manufacturing jobs and is now shifting to retail jobs, call center jobs, truck driving jobs and on and on through the economy.”