Presidential candidate Andrew Yang (D) on Monday evening mocked the mainstream media for still insisting that “Russia” collusion, “racism,” and “sexism” got President Donald Trump elected and not understanding that Trump’s economic nationalism actually propelled him to the White House.
Speaking at a raucous Lincoln Memorial rally in Washington, DC, Yang asked the crowd what the mainstream media often say when asked about how Trump won in 2016.
After the crowd answered “Russia,” Yang asked, “What is number two?”
“Racism, that’d be number two. Sexism, Facebook, FBI,” he said. “These are the explanations we are getting, but I looked at the numbers.”
Yang then said, “if you look at the numbers, you see there is a straight line up between the adoption of industrial robots in a voting district and the movement to Donald Trump.”
“The reason he is our president today is we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa—all of the swing states he needed to win and did win,” Yang continued.
The businessman who is running on giving every American adult a $1,000/month “freedom dividend” to better deal with the fourth industrial revolution (automation) conceded that Trump “got a lot of the fundamental problems right” in 2016 because Trump realized many Americans were hurting despite what the various metrics may have been indicating.
“Donald Trump is our president today because he got a lot of the fundamental problems right. He did. When he was going around saying, ‘hey things are not great,’ and then the counter was, ‘things are actually great,’ that was not the right response,” Yang said. “There are real problems on the ground. He got that much right, but unfortunately his solutions are the opposite of what we need. His solutions are that we have to turn the clock back, we have to build a wall, we have to try and… time only moves in one direction.”
Yang, who said a lot of working-class Trump supporters have told him on the trail that they are open to his candidacy, said he “wants to do the opposite of Donald Trump” and “accelerate our economy and society.”
“I want to prepare us for the true challenges of the 21st century, and I’m the right man for the job because the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math,” Yang said, concluding with what is becoming one of his signature applause lines on the stump.