Andrew Yang said he would pardon President Trump to unify the nation if he faces criminal charges after the 2020 election.
During an interview on ABC’s This Week, Yang warned against targeting Trump after Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren vowed to create a task force to investigate the president if she replaces him in the White House.
“You have to see what the facts on the ground are, and certainly, I would listen to the guidance of my attorney general,” the entrepreneur said. “But if you look at history around the world, it’s a very, very nasty pattern that developing countries have fallen into where a new president ends up throwing the president before them in jail.”
He continued, “That pattern, unfortunately, makes it very hard for any party to govern sustainably moving forward with a sense of unity among their people. And so to me, America should try to avoid that pattern if at all possible.”
Warren made the pledge to take “aggressive steps to root out the corruption and incompetence of the Trump administration and to hold that administration accountable” on day one of her presidency in a posting on her campaign website last month.
“Donald Trump has run the most corrupt administration in history. I will direct the Justice Department to establish a task force to investigate violations by Trump administration officials of federal bribery laws, insider trading laws, and other anti-corruption and public integrity laws, and give that task force independent authority to pursue any substantiated criminal and civil violations,” the plan said.
Yang, 45, has been one of the few Democratic candidates to pull support from those who voted for Trump in the past. The entrepreneur has argued that Trump won the 2016 election because he recognized that manufacturing workers were being replaced and ignored by much of the political movement. He has advocated for a $1,000 universal basic income to help workers replaced by automation.
In 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon after he resigned and left the White House. Ford argued that the divisiveness from Nixon’s resignation would “go on and on and on” if he did not end all criminal investigations by pardoning his predecessor.
