Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang took the fight to Indiana’s Mayor Pete Buttigieg during Friday evening’s debate in New Hampshire.
Following Buttigieg’s assessment of President Donald Trump’s acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial that ended two days earlier, Yang responded to the South Bend Mayor’s call for the American people to step into the role of jurors in November. (RELATED: ‘I’m Crushing On You’: 2020 Democrats Reveal Their Celebrity Crushes)
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“Mayor Pete, fundamentally you are missing the lesson of Donald Trump’s victory,” Yang cut right to the chase. “Donald Trump is not the cause of all of our problems and we’re making a mistake when we act like he is.”
Yang went on to explain that the problem was much broader than one man, arguing that Trump was essentially a “symptom of a disease that has been building up in our communities for years and decades, and it is our job to get to the harder work of actually curing the disease.”
The American way of life, he added, was disappearing while politicians appeared to be doing little more than pointing fingers.
“That’s why Iowa, a traditional swing state, went to Trump by almost ten points,” Yang continued. “That’s why Ohio, a traditional swing state, is now so red that I’m told we’re not even going to campaign there. So these communities are seeing their way of life get blasted into smithereens, we’ve automated away four million manufacturing jobs — and counting — we’re closing thirty percent of New Hampshire’s stores and malls, and Amazon, the force behind that, is literally paying zero in taxes.”
Yang concluded that fixing the deeper problems was the way to beat Trump in November. “These are the changes that Americans are seeing and feeling around us every day, and if we get to the hard work of curing those problems, we will not just defeat Donald Trump in the fall, but we will actually be able to move our communities forward,” he said.