“Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.” Those are the adjectives that the late attorney turned sportscaster Howard Cosell gleefully used to describe himself.
But while Cosell embraced the villain label all those years ago on Monday Night Football, I can’t think of a more appropriate way to describe faux presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Like many people, I first became familiar with Ramaswamy in August 2021 when I read his book Woke, Inc.
My takeaway was that Ramaswamy is a savvy businessman who knows how to make prudent investments, whether in biotech or other industries. I applauded him for exposing the hypocrisy of woke corporations — that have no problem virtue signaling and railing against the supposed racial injustices of our country — as they ship thousands of jobs overseas to countries like China that enslave their own citizens, while ignoring their atrocious human rights records.
I continued to watch Ramaswamy’s media appearances on Fox News over the last couple years and was genuinely interested in what he had to say — but never did I once think, here’s a guy who should be the new GOP standard bearer.
But now that he is running for president and seems to consistently poll around third or fourth in the GOP primary, I am even more convinced that he has no business getting anywhere close to the Oval Office.
Many people will read this and say, why am I attacking someone who is supposedly part of the America First Movement?
The answer is quite simple: he is not part of the America First Movement, he’s part of the Vivek Ramaswamy movement — which is to say, he is attempting to infiltrate a legitimate movement by trying to appeal to those who are in it.
I’ll admit, it’s a pretty ingenious strategy. What could be a more effective lane than trying to siphon off votes from both former President Trump’s base and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ supporters?
But the reality is, Ramaswamy is not running for president to be president, because there is no way in hell he’ll actually get elected. He’s smart enough to understand that. I doubt he’s even running for president to be a potential VP.
The real reason he’s running for president is because it is a good business decision for him.
By some estimates Ramaswamy is already worth more than $950 million. But being worth close to a billion dollars while being an obscure businessman is far different than being worth close to a billion dollars when everyone knows who you are — including foreign leaders.
I was already skeptical of a man running for president who prior to the 2020 election, did not vote since 2004. But his debate performance, in which he pathetically tried to emulate Obama (skinny guy with a funny last name), did nothing to change my mind, other than to confirm that he is an overconfident jerk who talks a big game.
Ramaswamy’s foreign policy proposals are not only entirely unrealistic, they’re a straight up disaster. Nikki Haley was not wrong, when she said of Ramaswamy during the first GOP debate, “he wants to hand Ukraine to Russia. He wants to let China eat Taiwan. He wants to go and stop funding Israel…You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.”
Obviously we can debate the merits of how much aid we should be providing to Ukraine, and by what metric it should be contingent on. But to listen to Ramaswamy talk about the conflict, he doesn’t seem to view Putin as any kind of serious threat to Europe or to the rest of the world for that matter. He also doesn’t seem to care if China controls all of Taiwan, so long as we no longer have to rely on them to produce semiconductors; and he seems to view Israel as just another country in the Middle East, not as one of our most important allies, and the only Democracy in a place surrounded by terrorists who seek to wipe it off the map.
And why does he keep proselytizing like some kind of saint that the reason for our nation’s decline is due to a national identity crisis — that only lord Ramaswamy can fix. It does not take a genius to realize the reason our nation is in decline is because we have a senile doddering old fool occupying the White House who is controlled by a group of radical Marxists who seek to destroy our country. We don’t need a televangelist in our home telling us what our values should be — we just need someone in charge of the federal government who doesn’t suck at their job, isn’t 1000 years old, isn’t corrupt and will actually put America first.
That’s not to say that Ramaswamy doesn’t have some good ideas when it comes to rooting out the deep state and securing our border, but for the most part, “his ideas” are just a rehashing of what the two clear front runners have already proposed — albeit in a Vivekian high-energy manner.
As Governor DeSantis has often said correctly, we’re not getting a mulligan in 2024.
The last thing we need is a man masquerading as a presidential candidate while simultaneously being a podcast host and interviewing James O’Keefe.
And for the record, even though Ramaswamy is now pretending to be Trump’s biggest fan boy, he certainly didn’t sound like he was a fan of Trump in his book, Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence, when he wrote of January 6th and Trump, “It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”
Ramaswamy is only sucking up to Trump now because he knows it will help his poll numbers.
But don’t let him fool you. The way he only posts videos on social media of someone (or perhaps a ball machine) gently feeding him forehands on the tennis court only further proves he’s hiding a lot more than his weak backhand.
From his own book "Nation of Victims.
“It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump. Conservatives have their own victimhood complexes these days; we are, after all, a nation of victims now. All that differs is whom we see as our oppressors. The worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen. Instead of distinguishing ourselves as the party that strives for excellence and rejects the easy path of victimhood narratives, we simply created our own. I voted for Trump in 2020. I had some policy disagreements with him—for example, I disapproved of his large-scale government spending and his tariff policies—but I voted for him anyway because he refused to apologize for the things that make America great. Like many Americans, I hungered for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence in our nation. To me, that was something worth voting for. Donald Trump was, notwithstanding his shortcomings, the candidate who best embodied American greatness. He was unafraid to stand up for it, and I respected that. But while Trump promised to lead the nation to recommit itself to the pursuit of greatness, what he delivered in the end was just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican party whole. When my candidate lost the election, I was dissatisfied, but I also felt a sense of peace. The election was done, and it was time to move on. No one likes a sore loser; that’s one of the worst victimhood complexes of all. Accepting the outcomes of elections and having a peaceful transition of power is part of what it means to be a constitutional republic: sometimes your team loses, but if you accept the result and prepare for the next election, eventually the scales will tip your way again. We fought, we lost, and I accepted the result. So I was especially disappointed when I saw President Trump take a page from the Stacey Abrams playbook. His claims were just as weak as Abrams’s. She claimed voter suppression, he claimed voter fraud. He filed scores of lawsuits over various claims of fraud, as was his right, but they came nowhere close to changing the outcome in a single state, let alone the several swing states whose results he needed to overturn. In many cases, judges the president himself had nominated ruled against him, a sign of health in our nation’s institutions. Of the sixty-two lawsuits he and his supporters filed, he lost all but one, a minor victory in Pennsylvania that affected few votes. A Supreme Court with a strong conservative majority ruled against President Trump twice. Top election officials in virtually every state, regardless of party, said they’d found no evidence of any significant level of fraud. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Security Agency issued a statement saying “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history… There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The president fired the agency’s director a few days later. In a call with Georgia’s secretary of state, the president implausibly claimed to have won every single state—something unprecedented in the nation’s history, and a sign that his claims weren’t grounded in fact. Mike Pence, a man I have great respect for, decided it was his constitutional duty to resist the president’s attempts to get him to unilaterally overturn the results of the election, even in the face of the January 6 Capitol riot. Our institutions did hold, in the end. But they shouldn’t have been tested. I won’t go into the details at length. The fact that all of our governmental institutions so unanimously found no evidence of significant fraud is telling. Furthermore, I’ve talked to many Republicans at all levels of government, and not one has ever presented convincing evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump; very few have seriously tried. I don’t believe that most Republican politicians actually think the election was stolen. Lately, more of them have started admitting that in public”.
He did not see what most of America saw and which ultimately drove them to protest in Washington D.C. on January 6. He admits it. Helen Keller would have seen it. This is all you need to consider regarding the MAGA movement and V. Ramaswamy.
Regardless whether one supports Donald Trump for another term, denial that the 2020 election was flat out stolen (and then covered up in the biggest conspiracy in human history) is the bright line for me.
Yes, the 2020 election was stolen, and yes, it was covered up. Anyone not agreeing with that is grossly naive, completely illiterate, or a Uniparty supporter. There is NO gray area for me, even though I typically avoid absolutes.
It appears impossible for him to explain his way out of this. However, if you go to Julie Kelly’s substack you will find Max Flasher, once a prominent poster on the AG site, despite having been made aware of this deep defect, supporting Ramaswamy.
Vivek also wants TPP back. If one listens closely to his policies, it’s easy to see he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Carpe fails to understand the hunger among Americans for someone - anyone - with a positive vision for this country. I’ll tell you this: Ramaswamy may be a con (isn’t that a pre-requisite to be a politician?), he may not have experience, and he may hold controversial positions. I won’t condemn someone who sees America’s best days ahead. Donald Trump, while claiming to espouse that view, seems to believe the country still exists because of Donald Trump, not the American people! Reading his childish and churlish post about Mitt Romney (good riddance to bad rubbish), many of us would just like Trump to STOP talking and START doing.
My biggest disagreement with Ramaswamy is TPP revival and immigration. I chalked that up to his inexperience.