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Knives Out for Vivek! Olivia Reingold

Published

11 months ago

August 24, 2023

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in the media spin room after the first debate of the GOP primary season. (All photos by Mustafa Hussain for The Free Press)

MILWAUKEE, Wis. — Heading into Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate, 55 percent of Republican voters were backing Donald Trump, who didn’t even bother to show up. So why did millions of viewers tune in?

Simple. To find out if any of the other eight Republicans who made it onto the debate stage has a chance of unseating him.

One way to judge the answer was to spend five minutes in the spin room with the press gaggle after the two-hour debate. Former and current governors were ignored. A staffer for one of those campaigns tried to offer an interview to a CNN reporter, who politely declined: “Sorry, they really want Vivek.”

And immediately, when the man himself walked out, he was mobbed. Only a few months ago, most of this crowd didn’t know his name, but now they were screaming it at full volume.

“Vivek, what’s your takeaway?!”

“How do you think you did tonight?!”

“What comes next for the campaign—how do you build upon this momentum?”

Another way to gauge it is to watch who took the most heat over the two-hour brawl. That lightning rod would be Vivek Ramaswamy—the 38-year-old political neophyte who dominated the night in Milwaukee. (And who was the most googled person last night in America other than Yevgeny Prigozhin).

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie compared Ramaswamy to Barack Obama, calling him an “amateur.” At another point, he jabbed: “I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT.”

Former vice president Mike Pence called Ramaswamy a “rookie.” He rubbed it in: “Let me explain it to you, Vivek, if I can. I’ll go slower this time. Now is not the time for on-the-job training.”

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley slammed him: “He wants to hand Ukraine to Russia, he wants to let China eat Taiwan, he wants to go and stop funding Israel,” she said. “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.” (She drew blood and loud cheers from the audience.)

It went on like this all night. But none of it seemed to bother Vivek, who—unlike Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who seemed to keep reminding himself to look happy—could not wipe the shit-eating grin off his face.

He seemed to be having a spectacular time.

And why shouldn’t he?

Ramaswamy, the founder of the biotechnology firm Roivant Sciences, was polling around one percent a few months ago. Now he’s at just under ten percent, which puts him in third behind Trump, polling at 52.1 percent, and DeSantis, at 15.2 percent.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis (with wife Casey) reportedly planned to “hammer” Ramaswamy at the debate, but for long stretches he barely made a peep.

Back in November, DeSantis was being hailed as the future of the Republican Party—a more palatable inheritor of Trumpism. But despite being the early favorite and raising $20 million in his campaign’s first six weeks, he is now polling at 15.2 percent. That number seems to get worse the more voters see of him.

Ahead of the debate, The New York Times reported that a trove of documents revealing the DeSantis debate strategy was posted on a website affiliated with his super PAC, Never Back Down. One key note urged him “to take a sledgehammer” to Vivek. Others cued him to “Call him ‘Fake Vivek’ or ‘Vivek the Fake.’ ”

But DeSantis barely made a mark last night. He had a single compelling opening line: “Our country is in decline,” he said. “The decline is a choice.” But the rest of the debate, he slipped into the shadows. There were stretches of time when he didn’t make a peep—until he popped back up, either to make a dig at Fauci or Hunter Biden. Once, he didn’t seem to understand it was his turn to answer—he just stood there wide-eyed, blinking, until the moderator prompted him again.

In contrast, by the end of the first hour, Ramaswamy was trending on Twitter. For what? It could’ve been any of the following: Saying Ukrainian president Zelensky was the “pope” of professional politicians. Saying “more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.” Saying he wanted to dismantle the Department of Education and the FBI.

Mike Pence slammed Ramaswamy as a “rookie,” adding that “now is not the time for on-the-job training.”

“The real choice we face in this primary is this. Do you want a super PAC puppet, or do you want a patriot who speaks the truth? Do you want incremental reform, which is what you’re hearing about, or do you want revolution?”

The only candidate who came out looking stronger from the evening was Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, looked and sounded presidential, and ripped into Ramaswamy, saying he lacked “moral clarity” and was “choosing a murderer”—Russian president Vladimir Putin—over the forces of democracy.

But for the most part it was as if there were really two kinds of candidates on stage—Ramaswamy and everyone else. The candidate who got that the game had been changed metabolically by the 2016 presidential election, and pretty much everyone else (starting with Pence, Christie, and DeSantis), who seemed to think GOP voters still care about their résumés.

“You hand it over to a new generation to actually fix the problem. That’s why I’m in this race, and we’re just getting warmed up,” Ramaswamy said, taking a swipe at everyone else on stage and—more importantly—making the case to the millions of Trump voters out there that, sure, the former president may be a force for good, but he’s pushing eighty. Maybe his best years are behind him. Plus, he has those four indictments and an inability to fight without name-calling. What Vivek promises is an “America First 2.0” agenda, as he’s branded it, but in the package of a Harvard man with a private plane, prepared to quote both the Founding Fathers and the Bible. (Like Trump, he also has his own hat. Instead of MAGA, it’s labeled TRUTH.)

Ramaswamy is swarmed by the media after his performance.

And, like the former president, he easily goes viral.

He started the week by posting a video of himself, shirtless on a tennis court, grunting and leaping to hit balls like his candidacy depended on it. “Three hours of solid debate prep this morning,” he captioned the clip, now seen over seven million times.

“That was my tennis court,” his neighbor from back home in Columbus, Ohio, proudly tells me at a rally Tuesday night in downtown Milwaukee (she asked to withhold her name out of fear that it could reveal Ramaswamy’s home address).

“He can use it whenever he wants—he’s a great tennis player. But he uses it rarely now; he’s been busy.”

When did she realize she might be living next door to the next president of the United States of America? Oh, the first time she met him, she says—about two years ago, when he came to their local country club to talk about his new book, Woke, Inc., his takedown of corporate America’s social policies that earned him airtime on Fox News.

“I knew he was special,” she says about their initial meeting. “You could hear a pin drop.”

Her friend, a blonde woman who also lives in the neighborhood, jumps in. “That’s when he inspired all of us,” she says. “His message was so inspiring that we felt like, ‘This is somebody who can unite us, not further divide us.’ There’s so much acrimony in our country, and it’s not just about a party. It’s about a message.”

Donald Trump skipped the debate (opting instead for a social media interview with Tucker Carlson), but his supporters were out in force in Milwaukee.

That’s the vision Ramaswamy is trying to sell to more than just his neighbors: that his America First 2.0 agenda stems from a positive playbook that doesn’t just harp on everything wrong with the country but encourages Americans to envision what could go right, too. At campaign events like his pre-debate event, Ramaswamy passes out pamphlets meant to look like an aged document like the Constitution, that list “Ten Truths.”

“We’re not just running from something,” the booklet, which Ramaswamy says he wrote while overcome with an epiphany on his private plane, proclaims. “We’re running to something.”

This is what he says will achieve national unity: “God is real, there are two genders, human flourishing requires fossil fuels,” and so on, and so forth. By the time he gets to the tenth “truth,” he’s touched every hot-button topic: affirmative action, capitalism, the FBI, and American exceptionalism.

But perhaps he’s looking for “truth” in the wrong places. A few days ago, the candidate got into hot water when The Atlantic published a profile of him, in which he questioned “how many police were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.”

“Maybe the answer is zero,” he said about the 9/11 attacks. “It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.”

When questioned by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins this week, he claimed the quote was “taken out of context,” even though the Atlantic reporter had published audio of the exchange online. One Wisconsin voter I met told me this whole ordeal is why Ramaswamy “is not a serious candidate.”

“I think it’s embarrassing,” says Logan Sajdowitz, a 21-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (he prefers DeSantis). “It’s weird.”

But Sajdowitz also is no fan of Trump. For those who are, Ramaswamy is seeming more and more like an appealing alternative to an ex-president weighed down with way too much baggage.

Back at Ramaswamy’s pre-debate rally, I spotted one of those voters. As soon as the young candidate thanked the crowd, a man in a MAGA hat and muddy Crocs pulled him in for a photo.

“We’ve gotta swap that out for a Truth hat,” Ramaswamy joked, patting the guy on the back.

That’s when the man replied: “Oh, I have one already.”

Olivia Reingold is a writer for The Free Press. Listen for more of her thoughts on the debate at our media roundtable moderated by Bari, which drops on Honestly later today.

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Also: We’re hosting our first live debate on September 13 at the Ace Theatre in Los Angeles! Has the sexual revolution failed? Come argue about it and have a drink. We can’t wait to meet you in person. You can purchase tickets now at thefp.com/debates.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

8 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

15 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

19 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641