When I saw the highlights of the first Republican presidential primary debate about exactly a month ago on August 23rd, my first thought was:
Wow, this is terrible.
I’ll set the scene: eight of the nine current frontrunners were lined up on stage in Milwaukee. One notable absence was former President Donald Trump, who, leading polls across the nation by considerable margins, refused to appear on the debate stage that night. Why would he, after all, completely waste his time in an unnecessary showing where his competitors (although I would hardly call them that) have the opportunity to take him down?
Naturally what ensued was an utterly pathetic showing from all the other candidates further confirming what was, and to this day is, an early truth in the 2024 election cycle: Donald Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee for President for the third consecutive time. Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pence were being booed at every occasion by the rowdy, very obviously pro-Trump crowd in that building. Ron DeSantis effectively shot down any remaining hype around his run that seemed to peak at the beginning of the year with an undertone and incredibly disappointing performance.
But I’m not here to talk about the debate or who the heck some of the people on stage that night in Milwaukee were (Doug Burgum… really?). Watching that hot mess, my only thought was that there was one clear winner of the debate: Donald Trump. Then, I saw a CNN video of a focus group of loyal Iowa Republicans being asked who they thought won the debate. There was one, overwhelming and surprisingly different answer:
Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy was born in 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio to Indian Hindu parents originally from Kerala. His parents immigrated to the United States in the 1970s, where his father was able to find work as an engineer and patent attorney for General Electric, while his mom worked as a geriatric psychiatrist. With two accomplished parents who found a better life in the US, he had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing and was able to achieve success himself. In high school, he was a nationally-ranked tennis player and graduated as valedictorian in 2003. He got accepted into Harvard, where he became president of the Harvard Political Union and earned a reputation as a great debater. He worked at massive hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs. He won a Bowdoin Prize for his senior thesis and later attended Yale Law School with a scholarship. He worked many years at a hedge fund and in 2014 founded a pharmaceutical company called Roivant Sciences. Through his career, he amassed a fortune and became a billionaire.
Vivek Ramaswamy is the perfect product of the so-called “American Dream”. The son of accomplished and hard-working immigrants, he was given the opportunities in life to succeed greatly and did.
Then, out of the blue, he chose to run for president, announcing his candidacy in the Republican primaries on the Tucker Carlson Show in February 2023. Let me just say this: announcing you’re going to run for president on Tucker Carlson is pretty indicative of the type of candidate you are.
Ramaswamy came right out of the gate swinging. With a campaign fund filled mostly with his own money, he’s traveled all over the country over the course of the year so far. What I’ve come to learn as I’ve delved deeper into Ramaswamy is how brilliant of a public speaker he is.
I mean he is really, really charismatic and likable. On the outside, he’s the perfect politician. He’s an excellent debater and has done a great job at portraying himself as energetic, passionate, and most of all persuasive. On a second watch of the primary debate, I was able to notice how captivating he truly was, and a lot of it came down to him always smiling for some reason. He’s just a masterful public speaker.
Through his campaigning, we have come to learn more about the ideas he brings to the table. The political positions he’s been expressing are controversial, to say it politely. Really though, it’s a hot mess and the stances he’s taken are all over the place.
He deplores abortion yet opposes a federal ban. He’s heavily “anti-woke”, calling the LGBTQ movement a “cult” and is against critical race theory and affirmative action. He believes in climate change, and has stated in the past that he acknowledges fossil fuels, but calls the climate change agenda a hoax and says “people should be proud to live a high carbon lifestyle” and that climate change “isn’t really bad”. This is WAY worse than just denying climate change; he’s actually fully endorsing it.
He wants to extend the power of the executive branch, pledging to cut 75% of the federal workforce and eliminate a number of established government departments including the FDA, the FBI, and even the entire Department of Education (as if he even has the power to do that… the Constitution exists buddy). He supports ending the war in Ukraine by giving Russia major concessions in exchange for ending their alliance with China (he clearly has no clue how international relations works) but he also supports Taiwanese independence and takes a strong stance against China. He’s even expressed how he thinks 9/11 was secretly actually the work of federal agents.
But I think the most damning of them all is his support for the elimination of the H-1B visa program. This is the program that allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers. It’s the visa that brings hundreds of thousands of families to the US, rewarding talented individuals with a place to work in one of the largest and freest economies in the world.
And he just wants to gut it.
This is truly depressing for someone who achieved everything in life because of the sacrifices and work put in by his parents to raise him in the United States. To give him the best life possible with the best opportunities possible to set him up for success. By cutting the H-1B visa, he’s taking away that opportunity from others.
And this is where we see Vivek’s true colors. The aforementioned political stances point him towards an ideology that can be aptly described as libertarian, ultra-conservative, Trumpist, and populist. The last one is especially prevalent, as the overarching message of his campaign and what he describes as his main ideology is solving America’s “national identity crisis”. He describes a country that’s lost, that doesn’t know what it wants, and that needs to “grow up”.
But beneath all the political science interpretations of what Ramaswamy stands for and where precisely he fits on the political spectrum is just a slimy, power-hungry, opportunist. Now I’m not the naive type who’s going to sit here and preach about him being the only one like this. In American politics right now, it’s much rarer to find someone who’s NOT like this, as cliche as that may sound. But for him, I think it can be narrowed down to just one word that highlights why he stands out.
For me, he’s just one big phony.
He’s fake. Simply put he’s a complete fraud. In the past, he has called TikTok “digital fentanyl” but recently created an account and said he changed his ideas. Shortly after he was endorsed by social media star Jake Paul. Clearly, he’s trying to pander to the younger voter base, using his image as the relatable millennial to gather support. The same young voter base, by the way, from whom he wants to take away their fundamental human, adult right to vote and participate in democracy freely by raising the voting age to 25 with exceptions for those who are first responders, served in the military, or passed a civics exam.
He is deeply, unapologetically pro-Trump. Time and time again he’s stated how he wants to continue the excellent work set forward by Trump and how he is essentially Trump but without the baggage. In the debate, when asked whether candidates would support Trump if chosen as the party nominee, he shot his hand into the air immediately. He’s taken Trump’s MAGA ideals and repurposed them to suit his narrative as a misfit youngster who’s “ready to take the world by storm” and fight against the evil of “wokeness”. He’s just one big walking cliche and I hate it.
He’s capitalizing on trends of hateful, borderline fascist political thought that since Trump’s rise to power in 2016 have plagued the Republican Party to shape an ideology that further appeals to his party’s base. Right now, he’s probably just doing all this in hopes of some job in Trump’s potential future government, and it’s embarrassingly clear.
But deeper than that, I see Ramaswamy’s rise in popularity in a different way too. He is emblematic of the state of American right-wing politics at the moment. The truth is, Ramaswamy is just the latest in a series of politicians from the Republican party that have subscribed to Trump’s MAGA movement and taken it to the next level. Ramaswamy has added himself to a list of individuals that includes Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Lauren Boebert. Figures who are pushing an agenda of hate and lunacy that is starting to stray far away from the true tenets of American conservatism. It really was sad to see candidates like Christie, Haley, and Pence, who a decade ago we would’ve seen as the most extreme of the GOP, be booed continuously by the MAGA crowd in Milwaukee.
Behind Ramaswamy’s charismatic and passionate facade, stealing the spotlight numerous times during that debate and currently second in the polls in New Hampshire (an early primary state), is a pretentious, snobby, elitist, ungrateful, fraudulent, hateful millennial who’s just riding on the tails of those who came before him and is just looking out for himself and for his clout. And I’m afraid he is just another in a series of many more in today’s Republican party.
His campaign slogan is “A New American Dream”; to that, I say: no thank you, Vivek. Not with you in charge.
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