Who The F*#k is Vivek Ramaswamy?

Vivek is a facile, clownish, shallow, shameless, pandering demagogue, but he is exactly what GOP voters crave these days.

Sane conservative Never-Trumper Charlie Sykes, writing in his August 24 newsletter.

Well, the Silly Season is once more upon us, and last night (as I write this) they held the first Republican Primary debate, in which, I dunno, seven or eight hopefuls took to the stage in an attempt to grab some limelight in advance of the upcoming Iowa caucuses, each, ostensibly, there to vie for the nomination for President. Big Bad Donald, ahead by something like 35-40 points over nearest competitor Ron DeSantis – despite (or because of?) being scheduled to surrender himself at the Fulton County jail the very next day – couldn’t be bothered to show, and why would he? Why stand there and give that rat bastard Chris Christie, mired at something like >4%, a chance to take his cheap shots all night long? Screw that. Let him and the rest of the jackals go off by themselves to joust for second place. That sort of thing is always fun to watch, and who knows, maybe the winner could serve as his running mate once the nomination is locked up, which might, actually, be what all of those also-rans are really hoping for, if indeed any sort of hope remains.

In that case, though, what’s Christie doing? Donald sure isn’t picking him to round out the ticket. So, what then, he’s fighting for the soul of the GOP? As if! The erstwhile King of New Jersey only stopped being a Trump sycophant after January 6, and then only because he sensed an opportunity, which isn’t panning out anyway, so what’s with the Man of Principle routine? Where’s that getting him? Same deal with DeSantis. Trump hates him, so he’s not rounding out any tickets either. Moreover, judging by his decidedly lacklustre performance last night, poor Ron may have already thrown in the towel, perhaps realizing just as well as we do that he can’t beat Donald any more than he can join him. So what’s he hanging around for? And what’s with Nikki Haley? She’s polling even lower than Christie! Does she imagine that Donald might pick her as his Veep? Really? A woman? A woman of colour? Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

Maybe they’re all hoping for a political miracle, which, to be fair, isn’t necessarily delusional. A long primary season stretches out ahead. Lots can happen. Things change. All right, let’s just say it out loud, Trump’s only a foregone conclusion so long as he’s still on this side of the lawn, OK? The morbidly obese, KFC-chugging monstrosity might shuffle off this mortal coil, what with all the stress from the serial prosecutions and such. He’s going on 78, after all. Stranger things have happened. Failing that, it’s still possible that the voters start having second thoughts, once they’re treated to the daily spectacle of Donald missing campaign events while shuttling sweatily between jurisdictions so he can be tried on four different indictments, comprising 91 separate felony counts. Not the easiest optics to overcome, even for him. Maybe, then, the smart play is to hold on for a while, clinging to that 3-4% of primary voters, while remaining visible in case Donald falters, and the party needs a plan B. You never know. This is politics. Nothing is impossible, not ever, and certainly not now with so many months to go.

If that’s the idea, it was Nikki Haley, arguably, who did herself the most favours last night. She came across as intelligent, pragmatic, informed, and, crucially, not at all mentally or emotionally unhinged. She’s clearly trying to position herself as a credible, electable second choice if for any reason Donald can’t take the nomination, and you know, I’m starting to think that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Yes, Nikki’s a craven opportunist, willing to say whatever Trumpworld wants to hear if it’ll get her anywhere, and yes, she spent the last several years mastering the fine art of licking Dear Leader’s grubby boots, which was disgusting, but she’s not an ideologue, she’s not an isolationist, she’s got both executive and foreign policy experience, and I don’t see her trying to destroy what’s left of America’s constitutional democracy if she winds up in the Oval. She’s a regular Republican, is all, profoundly misguided in an old school, Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan sort of way, and therefore deplorable in ordinary times, but as I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, these aren’t ordinary times. The debate isn’t about tax and environmental policy anymore, it’s about whether the country should give up on democracy, ditch the rule of law, bow to the inevitable, and devolve into a self-perpetuating autocracy. Given those stakes, I can live with Nikki Haley. Hooray Nikki Haley. I think.

Then there’s this guy:

Vivek Ramaswamy.

Who in this hard-scrabble Hellscape is Vivek Ramaswamy?

You might well ask. I certainly did, after watching the debate highlights, because I’d heard of him, and even gathered that he was rising a bit at the bottom end of the polls, but I didn’t really know anything about him. What I saw sent me scurrying to the computer. Who was this guy? Was he even old enough to run for President? What are his supposed qualifications? Why does he want the job?

So, then, the crash course on Vivek: Yes, he is old enough to run, though not by much; the Constitution sets a minimum age of 35, and he’s only 38. He’s from Ohio, born of immigrants. Surprisingly, for somebody hoping to get somewhere in the GOP, he’s not a Christian – he’s Hindu – and of course he’s not white either, though it’s not clear that his race matters all that much to the hard core primary voters. He’s terribly clever, holds degrees in both law and biology, and fancies himself a scientist. He’s also very wealthy, having managed, through his various stints as a hedge fund manager and pharma/biotech entrepreneur, to amass what Forbes estimates to be over 900 million bucks, close enough to call him a billionaire, which is indeed how he refers to himself. Like so many among the extremely wealthy, he’s also a bit of a loon, prone to extremism, and reckons he knows everything about everything, which must be true because after all, he’s so very, very rich.

Why is he running? Beats me. Maybe just for the hell of it. Maybe he’s bored. Maybe, having made himself into a billionaire, he needs a new challenge, and figures this President gig isn’t half as hard as all the morons make it out to be. Maybe he’s insanely ambitious. Maybe, on top of whatever else is driving him, he’s a vain, callow, unserious attention hog who loves the limelight, and simply adores the idea of holding the most powerful office in the world. In that case, maybe he figures that even if he doesn’t have a real shot at it this time, there’s always the next, and the next after that, since at his age, the window of opportunity stretches out for decades in front of him. No time like the present to get the ball rolling, right?

Whatever. They all have their reasons. At this point I’m not even sure I should care, since I’ll never understand it anyway. What does concern me, as well as others at my end of the political spectrum, and even some sensible Republicans, those who are left, is what he purports to believe, and what he aspires to be.

He obviously thinks his path to glory runs straight through the heartland of the MAGAverse, and just as obviously wants to be the next Donald, only new and improved. He therefore carried himself as if the debate was all about proving he has the right stuff for the heir-apparent role, and thus came not to bury Trump, but to praise him and be just like him, only moreso, to which end he certainly brought his “A” game. What a show he put on! Almost from the get-go, he elbowed himself into the spotlight, took over the conversation, and sucked up all the oxygen, talking over the others, interrupting, shouting, and grinning all the while like a polecat. He seemed determined to stake out the most outrageous positions on any issue that came up. He revelled in the audience reaction, having a ball while spouting whatever bullshit made the MAGA monsters in the audience hoot and holler. Just for starters, he demanded that everyone on stage make a pledge to pardon Trump if any of them becomes President. He then tried to rip Christie a new one for being mean to Dear Leader. He also declared the “climate change agenda” to be a “hoax”, and insisted that more people had already died from green initiatives than the effects of global warming. Like all of them, he came out strongly in favour of banning abortion. Whatever played.

For him, it was all pretty standard stuff, tame even, which we’d have known, had we been paying attention prior to last night. He’s been unequivocal, on the record, about all sorts of things. For instance, he says he wants to dismantle the federal government, and promises to start by firing at least 75% of the civil service, in part by way of abolishing the FBI and the IRS, and then either by gutting or entirely getting rid of various useless agencies like the Department of Education, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Food and Drug Administration. He’s avowedly pro-life because “abortion is murder”. He doesn’t think young adults in the 18-24 age group should be allowed to vote unless they can pass a civics test, with possible exceptions for those serving in the military or as first responders (shades of Starship Troopers – service guarantees citizenship!)

He’s also an “America First” isolationist, believing that Ukraine should be left unsupported to swing in the breeze, because Zelensky is a “bully”, and besides, after all that effort, Russia deserves to keep most of the land it’s conquered. He wouldn’t defend Taiwan, either – let President Xi take it by force, who cares, push comes to shove it’s nothing we need to worry about, so long as we build up our own semiconductor industry. He dabbles in conspiracy theories, suggesting, for example, that we don’t really know what happened on 9/11. That whole airplanes-hitting-the-Twin-Towers thing might have been an inside job (hey, he’s just asking questions), because who really knows, there “might have been federal agents on board those planes”, and if there were, well, what were they doing? He says what happened on January 6 strikes him as suspicious too, implying, without ever saying it outright, that the insurrection might have been a false flag operation.

There’s more! He doesn’t deny climate change is a thing, but nevertheless thinks that Americans should be “proud of their high carbon lifestyles”. He advocates plenty more fossil fuel exploration with a zeal you’d expect from someone who has a direct stake in the industry, which he does, though not in a big way (one of his companies has a modest share of Chevron). He decries what he calls “woke capitalism”, and all that fashionable corporate nonsense about diversity and inclusion. Racism? Sure, there’s racism in America, listen, he’s faced it himself, he knows all about it, but people have to understand that “experiencing hardship is not the same thing as being victimized”. Anyway, racism is dying out, fading away like a “burning ember” that’s soon to go dark. America has bigger fish to fry, like the invasion of illegal immigrants all along Biden’s open border, and the scourge of drugs coming in unimpeded from Mexico. He has a particularly enticing quick fix for the latter, in a cut-the-Gordian-Knot sort of way: annihilate the lot! “Annihilate”, that’s his word, not mine. But how? You guessed it, he thinks the American military should be engaging Mexican drug cartels by hitting them where they live, either by going in on the ground, or maybe just by bombing the shit out of them, he’s not sure about that yet, but the main thing is to let ’em have it, and screw what the Mexicans think (why didn’t we think of that?).

And so on.

The hell of it is, this guy is smooth. Oh boy is he smooth. He comes on like Trump with an IQ and an adult vocabulary, and he oozes all sorts of charm, not to mention a youthful vitality that makes the rest of the contenders look like superannuated white guys who ought to be thinking about their retirements. Look at him spewing his right wing tropes and catch phrases – he starts out sounding like a young Obama, but by the end it’s something closer to Barry Goldwater crossed with one of those very fine people in the pointy white hoods:

He’s amazingly comfortable up there under the bright lights, isn’t he? And look how slick he is, shovelling the bullshit, it really is a marvel. He’s loving it. He sells it. He says it with conviction. He might even believe it, and anyway he sure as hell knows what The Base wants to hear. He tickles them in all of their sweet spots, and like Donald, he’s a born showman, a real carnival barker; he understands in his bones how to tap into the emotions of all of those MAGA brainstems who yearn to be led around by their nose rings, while being reassured that it’s perfectly fine to be bigoted, narrow minded, and enraged at the way things are going as the cult of wokeness spreads like a malevolent, cancerous ink blot across their once proud nation. They eat it up, and he’s gaining traction:

A lot of those new Vivek fans seem not to have absorbed that as far as he’s concerned, they’re too young to vote.

It’s early days yet, but God help us, Vivek is starting to take on the aura of New Messiah. The other candidates can sense it; they spent most of the debate ignoring a hapless DeSantis, supposedly the guy to beat if you want to take a run at Trump, and took turns attacking the kid instead, criticizing him mainly for his youth and inexperience. Nikki Haley got a few good jabs in, but for the most part he just laughed it off, and gave it right back to them, a happy warrior delighted to be wearing the mantle of outsider. That’s especially scary. The Base loves an outsider. They thought Trump was an outsider, remember? They always think it’s going to take an outsider, somebody untainted by the corruption of the Beltway, to take on the Deep State and drain the swamp.

I swear, if Trump should falter, Vivek is just the sort of guy to scoop the crown out of the gutter. He might be the eventual Plan B, not Nikki Haley, or any of the other ho-hum candidates. Frankly, that’s terrifying. I’m telling you. He’s dangerous.

Am I overreacting? Yeah, possibly. I’ll grant you, there are all sorts of reasons why Ramaswamy might just be a blip, soon to be forgotten as the campaign rolls on, and the better-known contenders start going at it for real. For one thing, he looks too damned young to be wearing the big boy pants. For another, a Hindu isn’t exactly what the Evangelicals usually have in mind for the big chair. He’s also out to lunch on just about every policy question and cultural issue you can think of, and for all his glib, articulate salesmanship, he doesn’t know a whole hell of a lot about anything much. All true. Yet he walks and talks like he’s a sage and seasoned captain of industry, and on the religion front, look, an adulterous rapist wasn’t supposed to have been hunky dory with the Evangelicals either, but that didn’t put them off Donald, because he promised to give them what they wanted. Vivek can make that promise too. As to his essential ignorance on all matters of import, well, who cares? Nobody who might vote for him knows anything either, which is one of the reasons we got Orange Idi. As long as he can bullshit with the best of them – and he surely can – nobody’s going to be able to call him out on his stupid ideas and shallow policy prescriptions. He’ll just claim he’s right and his critics are wrong, and people will be glad to believe it, to the extent they even care.

It’s far, far too soon to panic, but far past time to start worrying. This one bears watching. He’s the Devil. The Mark of the Beast is upon him. My gut tells me that under the right circumstances, he could rise to the top of the heap with astonishing speed. He’s got just the populist, nationalist, quasi-fascist stuff they all eat with a spoon, and it seems to me that he’s no more improbable a candidate than Donald was at the beginning of 2015. He might be for real, if not now, then one day soon.

God save us.