‘Hard to Imagine’ Worse President

Defeating then-President Donald Trump was Andrew Yang‘s number one goal leading up to the 2020 election, but he’s not positive that would have happened if the COVID-19 pandemic never happened.

In his new book, Forward, the former Democratic presidential candidate wrote that he saw Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election as a nationwide cry for help and urged people not to dismiss his supporters. Although Trump lost to Joe Biden four years later, he earned a whopping 74 million votes, and Yang saw Trump’s increase in support from 2016 as a warning to Democrats.

“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,” Yang wrote. “It was a tough election for folks who had hoped for a repudiation of Trump.”

Americans overwhelmingly broke with Trump over how he handled the COVID-19 pandemic, a topic that dragged his overall approval rating down to historic lows for an exiting president. Yang acknowledged the blame that fell on Trump for the handling of the pandemic and wrote in Forward that it’s “hard to imagine a president doing a worse job than Trump of leading the country through the crisis.”

However, Yang didn’t put the entirety of the responsibility for America’s botched pandemic response on Trump. He took issue with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) being unable to carry out tasks that it “theoretically existed to do,” but didn’t have the “actual experience or muscle memory to execute urgently in real time.”

Problems with testing, access to personal protective equipment, and a lack of knowledge of the virus’ ability to spread to the United States from Europe plagued the early weeks of the pandemic. Yang homed in on the issue of contaminated tests being sent out in late January, just as cases were starting to spark in multiple areas of the country.

Resolving the testing issue meant losing time during one of the “most crucial periods in American history,” according to Yang. He also highlighted delays and issues with identifying passengers on flights who should quarantine and the lack of a robust centralized system to track cases. Yang dismissed arguments that more funding could have solved the problem, writing that the CDC fell “on its face” despite significant resources.

“For thousands of Americans, it was literally death by bureaucracy,” Yang wrote. “Our bureaucracies are too often embarrassingly or tragically ineffective and inefficient, and generally no one is held accountable when they fail.”

The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the top issues on voters’ minds during the 2020 election and attempts to curb the outbreak decimated the…