“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.