Former New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang (D) argued former President Donald Trump could have won the 2020 election if it were not for the COVID-19 pandemic, according to his book.
Newsweek reported that Yang explained in his book, “Forward,” Trump’s 2016 victory was “a nationwide cry for help and urged people not to dismiss his supporters.”‘
He also reportedly saw the rise in support for Trump from 2016 as a warning to Democrats. Yang wrote, “It was likely that he might even have won if not for the coronavirus, which had killed 230,000 Americans by the time of the election.”
The former mayoral candidate continued, “It was a tough election for folks who had hoped for a repudiation of Trump.”
He argued in his book it is “hard to imagine a president doing a worse job than Trump of leading the country through the crisis.”
Yang not only took issue with the former president’s handling of the pandemic. He placed some blame on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saying the agency was unable to complete tasks it “theoretically existed to do,” but did not have the “actual experience or muscle memory to execute urgently in real time,” as the outlet reports.
According to his book, Yang expressed disappointment with testing, access to personal protective equipment, and a lack of awareness of how the virus could travel to the United States from Europe.
Additionally, Yang discussed issues with contact tracing.
“For thousands of Americans, it was literally death by bureaucracy,” Yang said. “Our bureaucracies are too often embarrassingly or tragically ineffective and inefficient, and generally no one is held accountable when they fail.”
The Washington Post reported last month the priorities of White House officials rested on the former president’s attempts to challenge the election rather than the pandemic, citing emails obtained by the House select subcommittee.
President Joe Biden seemingly took a swipe at Trump for his handling of the pandemic while speaking to reporters last week, as IJR reported.
“Take a look at what I inherited when I came into office, the state of affairs, and where we were. We had four million people vaccinated. We had no plan. I mean, I can go down the list. So part of it is dealing with the panoply of things that landed on my plate,” Biden said.
