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I don’t remember the first time I saw Vivek Ramaswamy in one of the countless cable news hits he’s done since the announcement of his presidential campaign just over six months ago, but I remember the first time he held my attention. It wasn’t a cable news hit. It was some random video in my timeline.
Mr. Ramaswamy was at a campaign event six weeks ago in Ottumwa, Iowa, a town of 25,000 that has seen five presidential visits, most recently with then-Pres. Obama in 2010. This small town hall was hosted by the local GOP.
He was in the middle of a longer answer about “firing the managerial class of the Pentagon” over the accusation against top military leadership of engaging in “wokism” and so on—you’ve likely heard some version of these thoughts from one of the countless rightwing provocateurs who parrot it—when suddenly, he was interrupted by a shouting protestor.
The protestor—whose name I ain’t gonna put here in order to protect her privacy—was yelling at Mr. Ramaswamy: “Protect women! I am not having someone else’s kid if they rape me!”
He immediately (and curiously) said “Amen!” and attempted to pivot in some related direction (the audio is a bit muffled) when she responded: “Republicans are raping people! President Trump is a rapist!”
There were overlapping interruptions until she was swarmed by campaign staff and volunteers, who motioned for her to leave, which she started to do for about 15 yards, when Mr. Ramaswamy asked for her to come back and speak. So, she walked back up, to in front of the stage, and did speak.
She talked about abortion rights and the absolute terror of living in a country in which rape can be a death sentence because of unnecessary and clownish (my words) restrictions on abortion care.
Mr. Ramaswamy waited for to say her piece and asked for her name and if she said she’s a mother (yes, she said, and her kids are successful) and he replied: “I want to say you’re doing one of the most important things...a mother raising more children in this world. Even if we have our disagreements, I want to say thank you for that. So thank you.”
She started to walk back out—probably because this was all a bit overwhelming, she later told an NBC reporter she had no plans to interrupt or protest the event—when Mr. Ramaswamy then said this:
“And part of what it means to live in this country is we have free speech, we get to speak our minds openly, even if we all don’t agree on it. So, let’s actually applaud her for the courage, coming into a room and asking a question even though we don’t agree on everything, OK?”
She nodded to acknowledge what he said, the audience applauded her as she was walking out, and that was it.
Mr. Ramaswamy supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election and has steadfastly defended him in the public square against his various indictments and other legal controversies in recent months. He is absolutely a Trump supporter, but what he did at that event was not a very Trumpian move.
His political idol—the inspiration for his entry into politics—would not have asked the woman to come back and speak her mind. He would have done some combination of talking over her, mocking her, and exploring sidebar topics that were halfway between adjacent to the discussion-at-hand and seemingly random.
We all know this.
But Mr. Ramaswamy invited her back and gave her the space to speak and then deftly defused the tension in the venue with praise for her, and by the time she was walking out of that event, he was looking pretty good to a lot of people.
Was it sincere? Probably not. Was it very contrived retail politics? Yeah. But honestly, I don’t think it really matters. I think debating his intentions in that moment is worthless, knowing that the folks who would debate something like that were not his intended audience.
At no point did he admit that he or Trump are wrong. He just expressed a basic show of empathy on shared values that sounded really classy to his intended audience. It wasn’t to convince the likes of me, I know that, because I am not who he has in mind in his broad messaging.
He threaded the needle in that moment for Trump supporters, however cynically, in such a way that he got credit for both refusing to budge on his views and coming across as a decent man, the latter of which Trump has struggled to do most (all?) of his life, even when he’s actually trying.
So, now, Trump supporters can show this video to others and say: See? We’re decent folks who respect each other in disagreement. It’s the left who shows up to interrupt a conversation and stir up trouble.
Again, I need to emphasize that whether or not this makes anti-Trump folks (like myself) feel anger or frustration or annoyance is completely besides the point because once again: we are not the intended audience for Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign comms strategy.
Mr. Ramaswamy has one goal in mind: he wants to be the heir apparent for the Trump wing of the Republican Party (which is most of the GOP). He wants to succeed him as the leader of that faction, which has reliably kept Mr. Trump in place as the de facto leader of the Republican Party.
The only thing that matters to Mr. Ramaswamy in this moment is positioning himself as the obvious choice to pick up that mantle, however far in the future. Maybe that includes angling for the bottom of the ticket, but even if he missed out on that, he’s still building his brand solely in Trump’s image for that handoff.
Take last night’s debate. Mr. Ramaswamy was widely criticized for his over-the-top, bombastic, uninformed, meandering, and non-sensical performance. He repeatedly talked over his opponents and the moderators. He seemed to relish embodying an intentional arrogance.
Sound like anyone to you?
Mr. Ramaswamy wasn’t at the debate last night to court MSNBC commentators who have spent last night and this morning consistently praising (and rightly so) former U.N. Ambassador (and South Carolina governor) Nikki Haley for handing Mr. Ramaswamy’s ass to himself with logic in a heated exchange.
He wasn’t there to court the minority of Republican voters who (rightly) believe his political hero is a traitor to American democracy or (correctly) sense that the Era of Trump will eventually end in disaster for the GOP.
He wasn’t there for social media pundits like myself who have found it all-to-easy to mock his manic performance. (I likened his general vibe last night to that of a youth pastor who taken’s a bump of cocaine backstage before coming out to deliver a sermon.)
No, he was there to audition for an audience of one: Donald John Trump, and it didn’t take long for supporters of Mr. Trump to pick up on that.
Mr. Ramaswamy declined to offer any support for accountability of Mr. Trump in the midst of his myriad indictments and other legal controversies. Whereas as every other candidate, to some degree, criticized Mr. Trump, he has stood steadfastly beside his political hero and defended him.
This is not by accident. The party’s frontrunner may not have been present last night, but the spirit of Trumpism was very much present in Mr. Ramaswamy’s performance.
All of the other candidates on that stage last night have been struggling with a common puzzle: how to attract Trump supporters without alienating them — with these added complexities: 1) the risk in turning off moderate voters in the general (as Trump does) and 2) the risk in attaching their integrity to a sinking sink (which Trump is).
Unsurprisingly, none of these candidates have come close to figuring it out, probably because it’s an impossible task. Mr. Trump’s voters only want him. Prime example: look no further than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has a glittering resume and—until recently—had the wide backing of much of the Republican establishment.
Mr. DeSantis’ message to the Trump faction has been: I’m not saying my approach is morally better; I’m saying my approach is smarter, and we can go a lot further in conservative goals with my approach.
Mr. DeSantis has attempted to run to the right of Mr. Trump, seeming to throw down a gauntlet: This guy is all talk; I am all action. Watch me go after Mickey Mouse. Watch me take over universities. Watch me ban books. Watch me not give a damn what my critics think, either, including Trump.
The Governor of Florida has sought to present himself as the new and improved Donald Trump, with far greater discipline and actual legal and policy chops — Trump without the embarrassing gaffes, Trump without the raging narcissism, Trump without the self-destructive chaos.
His efforts over the past several years in the direction of this goal have mostly failed because it turns out—surprise—that Trump supporters do not want an improved version of Mr. Trump. They don’t see need for improvement. They want Mr. Trump in the original packaging, thank you very much.
I firmly believe that every candidate on that stage last night understands this about Trump supporters, but none of them have been willing to do what Mr. Ramaswamy is clearly doing: unapologetically embracing everything about Mr. Trump, no matter how awful, in an attempt to be anointed as his successor someday.
Mr. Ramaswamy is not actually running for president; he’s running to be Mr. Trump’s crown prince, and if Mr. Trump should, someday, find himself out of the running due to the overwhelming legal quagmire he’s currently in, Mr. Ramaswamy is waiting there with open arms: your vision and your legacy are safe with me.
And if Mr. Trump stays in the race, despite the very steep legal challenges, Mr. Ramaswamy is setting himself up as a strong Veep choice or, barring that, with an unconditional blessing and unparalleled favor from the leader of the GOP.
That’s the goal.
To do that, Mr. Ramaswamy has clearly decided he must kill his own ego and shed any sense of shame. All that matters is being an especially devoted cover band for the twice-impeached, 4x-indicted, former president.
It means pretending that he is not a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, summa cum laude, of Harvard College and earned his law degree from Yale with the assistance of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a fact which was inexplicably removed from his Wikipedia article back in May.
It means pretending that he is, somehow, the only millennial of his high intellectual curiosity who has not hunched over a computer at any point in the past two decades and typed the words “climate change” into the Google search box and pressed enter.
It means pretending that he lacks the requisite legal education—let alone, the best legal education in the world—to clearly discern that Mr. Trump has repeatedly and flagrantly and shamelessly broken federal and state law many, many, many times over.
It means pretending that the list of “truths” he has taken to parroting—an itemized ideology of Trumpism tenets, basically—are somehow not completely antithetical to basic critical thinking skills, let alone the whole of his elite education and life experience.
It means pretending, to all the world, that he is somehow inferior to Mr. Trump, which everyone knows is completely false, including Mr. Trump himself. The point is not to acknowledge what’s obvious to everyone; the point is the performative kneeling that is required to sell himself to Mr. Trump as eventual heir.
And it all comes with enormous risk. Mr. Trump has managed to evade, for six years, substantial accountability for his numerous crimes and acts of cruelty. Now, in recent months, full accountability of Mr. Trump feels more real to the country than at any point in this era. It feels inevitable.
Four active indictments, 91 total federal and state charges, ranging from obstruction to racketeering to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government to illegally hoarding highly classified documents pertaining to our national security, on record openly admitting to wrongdoing, legally screwed beyond imagination.
If Mr. Ramaswamy makes his own future inextricably bound with the reputation of the person previously described, he certainly risks going down with the ship, even if he didn’t break any laws.
That’s the gambit. All the other candidates in this race are trying to shape some kind of reasonable, post-Trump future, and wouldn’t dare careening off the cliff with him — yet, Mr. Ramaswamy is doing exactly that and hoping it pays off with being anointed by Mr. Trump, one way or the other.
He doesn’t care about annoying or enraging the other candidates. He doesn’t care about the lectures from pundits across the spectrum. He doesn’t care about shame. He only cares about fully committing to this singular role.
It would seem Trump supporters sense this. While most non-Trump folks were picking Mr. Ramaswamy apart last night, myself included, he was earning high marks from Trump folks who were watching.
When CNN did a post-debate poll among a focus group of 15 Republican voters in Iowa, these were the results: seven for Mr. Ramaswamy, four for Ambassador Haley, two for Gov. DeSantis, and two abstentions.
The cherry-on-top for Mr. Ramaswamy was the praise posted by Mr. Trump on his platform Truth Social: “This answer gave Vivek Ramaswamy a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH. Thank you Vivek!”
What answer had Mr. Ramaswamy given that so impressed Mr. Trump?
“President Trump, I believe, was the best president of the 21st century.”
Made in his own image, indeed.
Hi, I’m Charlotte Clymer, and this is Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, my Substack. It’s completely free to access and read, but it’s also how my bills! So, please do kindly consider upgrading to a paid subscription: just $7/month or save money with the $70/annual sub. You can also go way above and beyond by becoming a Founding Member at $250.
The Vivek Gambit