“We’ve become a party of losers,” the conservative businessman Vivek Ramaswamy declared during the opening minutes of tonight’s Republican primary debate in Florida. He bemoaned the GOP’s lackluster performance in Tuesday’s elections, and then he identified the Republican he held personally responsible for the party’s defeats. Was this the moment, a viewer might have wondered, that a top GOP presidential contender would finally take on Donald Trump, the absent frontrunner who hasn’t deigned to join his rivals on the debate stage?
Of course not.
Ramaswamy proceeded to blame not the GOP’s undisputed leader for the past seven years but Ronna McDaniel, the party functionary unknown to most Americans who chairs the Republican National Committee. After calling on McDaniel to resign, Ramaswamy then attacked one of the debate moderators, Kristen Welker of NBC News, before turning his ire on two of his onstage competitors, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.
The moment was a fitting encapsulation of a debate that, like the first two Republican primary match-ups, all but ignored the candidate who wasn’t there. Five Republicans stood on the Miami stage tonight—Ramaswamy, Haley, DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Tim Scott—and none of them are likely to be elected president next year. The candidate of either party most likely to win the election is Trump, who held a rally a half hour away. His putative challengers barely uttered his name.
NBC’s moderators tried to force the issue at the start. Lester Holt asked each of the candidates to explain why they should be president and Trump should not. Haley and DeSantis, who are now Trump’s closest competitors (a modest distinction), offered some mild criticism. The Florida governor chastised Trump for increasing the national debt and failing to get Mexico to pay for his Southern border wall. “I thought he was the right president at the right time. I don’t think he’s the right president now,” was the most that Haley, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, could muster. Only Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has become Trump’s fiercest GOP critic on the campaign trail, assailed the former president with any relish. “Anybody who’s going to be spending the next year-and-a-half of their life focusing on keeping themselves out of jail cannot lead this party or this country,” Christie said.
And with that, Trump became an afterthought for the remainder of the debate. The evening featured plenty of substance, as the candidates offered mostly robust defenses of Israel in its war with Hamas, denounced rising anti-Semitism on college campuses, and disputed how much support the U.S. should give Ukraine. At the behest of moderator Hugh Hewitt, they spent several minutes discussing the optimal size of America’s naval fleet.
The spiciest exchanges involved Ramaswamy and Haley, who made no effort to hide their disdain for one another. Ramaswamy drew boos from the audience after he criticized Haley’s hawkish foreign policy by calling her “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.” Later he invoked her daughter’s use of TikTok to accuse her of hypocrisy on China’s ownership of the social-media platform. “Keep my daughter’s name out of your voice,” Haley shot back. “You’re just scum.” Ramaswamy and Haley also went after DeSantis, though in less personal terms.
That Ramaswamy would target Haley was not a surprise. She came into the debate as the challenger of the moment, having displaced Ramaswamy, whose candidacy has lost momentum since his breakout performance in the first GOP primary debate in August. He can partly blame Haley for his slide: Her mocking retort—“Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber”—was the highlight of the last everyone-but-Trump pile-up in September. The former South Carolina governor’s consistency across both debates has helped her overtake DeSantis for second place in New Hampshire and gain on him in Iowa. Haley also fared the best in a hypothetical general-election match-up with Biden in a batch of swing-state polls released this week by The New York Times and Siena College.
As my colleague Elaine Godfrey reported this week, Haley is appealing to primary voters who are “yearning for a standard-issue Republican”—a tax-cutting, socially conservative foreign-policy hawk who won’t have to spend the next several months fighting felony charges in courtrooms up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Her performance tonight—as steady as during the first two debates—seems unlikely to hurt her standing. The problem for Haley, as for the other contenders on tonight’s stage, is that less than half of the GOP electorate wants a standard-issue Republican. Trump still has a tight grip on a majority of GOP voters, and his lead over Biden in recent polling undermines his rivals’ argument that his nomination could cost the party next year’s election.
If nothing else, each of these Trump-less debates offers his opponents a free shot to make the case against him, a platform to criticize the frontrunner without facing an immediate rebuttal. For the third time in a row, Haley and her competitors mostly passed up their chance. If they’re angling to be Trump’s running mate or emergency replacement, perhaps they’ve advanced their cause. But if their goal is to dislodge Trump as the nominee, opportunities like tonight’s are slipping away.
One couldn’t help but pity the dutiful campaign staffers and surrogates who trickled into the spin room in Milwaukee last night. They arrived with an unenviable task: to convince reporters that their respective candidates had won the first debate of the Republican presidential primary.
To anyone who had watched, it was plain, of course, that none of the eight Republicans onstage had won in any meaningful sense. Donald Trump—facing four indictments and leading in the polls by 40 points—didn’t even bother to show up. And with many voters tuning in to the race for the first time, Trump’s rivals struggled to show they were equipped to take him down. In fact, few even tried. The former president’s name barely came up in the debate’s first hour—and when the conversation did turn to the subject of his growing rap sheet, most of the candidates defended him. All but two pledged to support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he is convicted. By the end of the evening, Trump’s path to renomination looked clearer than ever.
So how to spin this state of affairs if you work for one of the also-rans?
The answer, it turned out, was simple: Ignore it.
In multiple interviews after last night’s debate, I asked GOP campaign representatives how they planned to win the primary if their candidates were unwilling to directly confront Trump. Some offered platitudes—“This is a marathon, not a sprint.” Others gestured vaguely at plans to criticize the front-runner in the future. Most flatly refused to acknowledge the reality of Trump’s current dominance in the race. They preferred to pretend.
Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a supporter of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, scoffed when I mentioned Trump’s lead in the polls. “Go back and look at where Ted [Cruz] was in the numbers in 2016,” Roy instructed me.
“But … Cruz didn’t win the primary,” I replied, confused.
“Well, but he won Iowa!”
Matt Gorman, a spokesperson for Senator Tim Scott’s campaign, complained that reporters and pundits were overstating the likelihood of another Trump nomination. “Too many people think it’s inevitable,” he said. But when asked how that outcome might be avoided, Gorman had only wishful thinking to offer: “We hope that [Trump] debates. That’s our hope.”
It’s easy to see why, in an ideal world, Trump’s rivals would want to get him back on the debate stage. Several of the candidates managed strong moments last night. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley earned loud applause after calling out Republicans in Washington for adding trillions of dollars to the national debt: “Our kids are never going to forgive us for this.” Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie offered a passionate defense of former Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to go along with Trump’s ploy to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021: “He deserves not grudging credit. He deserves our thanks as Americans for putting his oath of office and the Constitution of the United States before personal, political, and unfair pressure.” And the 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy successfully made himself the evening’s main character with a rat-a-tat of Trumpian talking points, one-liners, and comic insults that aggravated his opponents as the debate wore on.
Some of the debate’s sharpest moments came when the candidates were tangling with Ramaswamy. Christie derided him as an “amateur” who “sounds like ChatGPT.” Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, snapped at him, “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.” Even Pence, who typically affects the manner of a sleepy Sunday-school teacher, seemed to repeatedly lose his cool with Ramaswamy. “Now is not the time for on-the-job training,” Pence said at one point. “We don’t need to bring in a rookie.” (This counts as a harsh burn for Pence.)
On social media and in the press room, theories abounded as to why Ramaswamy seemed to be getting under so many of his opponents’ skin. Maybe it was generational—the know-it-all Millennial with the irritating high-school-debate patter disrespecting his Boomer elders. Or maybe it was his “Ted Cruz energy”—that signature blend of arrogance and smarminess that seems calibrated to repel. Certainly it didn’t help that Ramaswamy insisted on dismissing his opponents as “super-PAC puppets.”
But perhaps the onstage hostility had less to do with Ramaswamy than with that other blustery political neophyte who cartwheeled into GOP politics one day on a whim and promptly overshadowed the rest of the field. With Trump refusing to participate in the debates, Ramaswamy made for a serviceable proxy. (Certainly, his campaign seems to share Trump’s taste for trolling: When I asked Chris Grant, a Ramaswamy adviser, about Pence’s repeated outbursts at the candidate last night, Grant laughed and then giddily compared the former vice president to the grandpa on The Simpsons yelling at a cloud.) Still, sinking Ramaswamy—who currently polls in the high single digits—won’t meaningfully change the shape of the field. The only way to pull that off is to take votes away from the front-runner. And no one seems to have a clear plan to do that.
Back in January, I wrote about the “magical thinking” that pervaded the GOP ahead of 2024. Virtually everyone in the party I talked with—donors, strategists, elected officials—wanted to move on from Trump, but no one was willing to do anything about it. Instead, they all seemed to be waiting for the problem to resolve itself, whether via criminal charges or death or some other miraculous development. “There is a desire for deus ex machina,” one GOP consultant told me at the time. “It’s like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic.”
Seven months later, on a debate stage in Milwaukee, we witnessed the natural consequence of this attitude. Trump—still alive—is gliding toward his third consecutive presidential nomination while his rivals squabble with one another.
This summer, I set out to write about Vivek Ramaswamy because I thought that his public-speaking skills set him apart from his GOP presidential rivals. Whereas most candidates were struggling to find their lane, Ramaswamy knew exactly what he was offering: a message that seemed to be libertarian at its core, paired with views that were consistent with more extreme corners of the right. Ramaswamy’s team agreed to participate in the profile.
Ramaswamy let me shadow him over the course of three days at the end of July. I visited his Ohio campaign headquarters and got a behind-the-scenes view of several of his media appearances. He brought me to his home and introduced me to his family. I flew aboard a private jet with him and rode on his campaign bus in Iowa.
Over the three days, Ramaswamy and I had regular conversations—sometimes in short bursts, other times in longer sit-down sessions. Last night, in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, he used the phrase free-flowing to describe our interactions. Our discussions were often challenging, but they were always respectful. With Ramaswamy’s permission, and in keeping with standard journalistic practice, I recorded all of our interviews.
During our final interview aboard his campaign bus, I brought up one of his more explosive claims—a suggestion that we don’t know “the truth” about January 6. I asked him: What is the truth about January 6 that you’re referring to? His answer went down a curious path, invoking the investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks, among other topics. At one point, he said this to me: “I think it is legitimate to say, How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers? Like, I think we want—maybe the answer is zero, probably is zero for all I know, right?”
Yesterday, after The Atlantic published my story and his comments about 9/11 and January 6 drew attention, Ramaswamy told Semafor that the quote we published wasn’t “exactly what I said.” Last night, asked by CNN’s Collins about the same quote, Ramaswamy said, “I’m telling you the quote is wrong, actually.”
The quote is correct.
Here is the unedited audio and a transcript of our exchange about 9/11 and January 6.
John Hendrickson: When you talk about all the things, We can handle the truth about X, you know, and you list off a bunch of stuff—one of them that you said last night is: We can handle the truth about January 6. What is the truth about January 6 that you’re referring to?
Vivek Ramaswamy: I don’t know, but we can handle it. Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?
Hendrickson: You mean like entrapment?
Ramaswamy: Yeah. Absolutely. Why can the government not be transparent about something that we’re using? Terrorists, or the kind of tactics used to fight terrorists. If we find that there are hundreds of our own in the ranks on the day that they were, that they were—I mean, look …
Hendrickson: Well, there’s a difference between entrapment and a difference between a law-enforcement agent identifying—
Ramaswamy: I think it is legitimate to say, How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers? Like, I think we want—maybe the answer is zero, probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.
Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of. And there can’t be hush-hush, separate, it shouldn’t be outside the commission, leaked to some media personality the hours of footage. No, this is transparent. These are the doors that were open. Here are the people that opened the doors, to whom? Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who were unarmed. What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right? There’s very little evidence of people being arrested for being armed that day. Most of the people who were armed, I assume the federal officers who were out there were armed. And so, I don’t know the answers. We deserve to know the answers, right?
We did a Jan. 6 commission. There are certain questions you can ask. We did a 9/11 commission, and if there are federal agents on the plane we deserve to know. And if we’re doing a Jan. 6 commission and there are federal officers in the field, we deserve to know. Just tell us the truth. Tell us what happened.
And it’s not just that, right? I think it’s also the reflective, the reflection on the truth about the underlying motivations of people. What were the sources of the frustration? Right? Is it really just, Donald Trump riled them up in an eight-week period? Or are these people who have been lied to and suppressed for a longer period of time? I think it’s clearly the latter, right? And I think that the failure to recognize the whole truth—we want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s, that’s really, when I say we deserve—and I don’t think we’ve gotten it on any of those questions. On the Jeffrey Epstein client list, on unidentified flying objects, on January 6, on vaccine—on COVID-19 vaccine—on the origin of the pandemic, which we now know, by the way, systematic efforts by people who had no idea what the origin was to shoot down the origin. And I remember this at the time there were people in sort of the, uh, like, in the sort of the greater Harvard/MIT space, the Broad Institute and otherwise, who were sort of talking about, Well, there’s a decent chance it could have, but we should be careful about talking about this or It could undermine, erosion of trust in science. There’s no such thing as a noble lie. That’s my view. The noble lie is nonexistent. No lie is noble.
Hendrickson: I think it’s interesting to compare and contrast 9/11 and January 6.
Ramaswamy: Oh, yeah. I don’t think they belong in the same conversation. I’m only bringing it up because it was … I am not making the comparison. I think it’s a ridiculous comparison—
Hendrickson: I’m not comparing—
Ramaswamy: But I’m saying that I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the Jan. 6 commission.
Hendrickson: Of course. What I’m saying, though, is that I think Democrats and Republicans would agree that 9/11 is a day that’s like Pearl Harbor day, where there are good guys and bad guys and America was attacked. I mean, I think that’s very clear—
Ramaswamy: I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11. I mean, I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.
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Vivek Ramaswamy leaned forward in his leather seat aboard the Cessna 750. He was fiddling with his pen, talking about Donald Trump. It was the final Friday in July. In several hours he’d join his fellow Republican presidential contenders at the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. Ramaswamy—not even 40, zero political experience—was the second-to-last speaker on the bill. Trump, of course, was the headliner.
Ramaswamy is the author of Woke, Inc., a book-length takedown of corporations that champion moral causes along with profits. The treatise was a New York Times best-seller and is now part of the American culture-war canon. His first company, Roivant Sciences, netted him hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing a Wall Street ethos to biotech: Drug patents were prospective assets. Another Ramaswamy venture, Strive Asset Management, markets itself as a place where return-on-investment outweighs all else, including concerns about social issues or the environment.
That afternoon’s flight was a short hop, Columbus to Des Moines. As the private jet barreled west, Ramaswamy sipped a Perrier and scribbled his thoughts in a large notebook. It was on a flight like this, he told me, where he sketched out his 10 “truths”:
God is real. There are two genders. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is no border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.
“I just wrote down things that are true,” he said flatly. “It took me about 15 minutes.”
Ramaswamy doesn’t consider himself a culture warrior; he insists that he is merely speaking the truth. He presents his ideas as self-evident, eternal truths. I asked him if he believes that truths can change over time. For instance, what did he make of the fact that most white Americans used to view it as a “truth” that Black people were genetically inferior—that they weren’t fully human?
“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.
“It is true,” I said. “That’s partly what justified slavery.”
“But it was a justification; it wasn’t a belief,” he said. “Look at emperors—Septimius Severus in Rome. He was Black. He had dark skin. They viewed dark skin as the way we view dark eyes.”
This is how a debate with Ramaswamy unfolds. He’ll engage with your question, but, when needed, he’ll expand its parameters. If that fails, he’ll pivot to thoughts on the existence of a higher power. “I don’t think that human beings ever accepted that Black people were not created equal in the eyes of God,” he said. (His favorite president, Thomas Jefferson, believed exactly that.)
Here’s where else he’s gone in his quest for the truth. He has tantalized audiences with the idea that Americans don’t know “the truth about January 6” and has argued that those who stormed the Capitol have been lied to and “suppressed.” He argues that people who identify as transgender suffer from a mental-health disorder: “I think there is something else going wrong in that person’’s life, badly wrong,” he has said. He calls race-based affirmative action “a cancer” and vows to end it “in every sphere of American life.” He endorses using the military to secure America’s borders, brokering a deal that would cede a huge chunk of Ukraine to Russia, and defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression “only as far as 2028.” His grandest vision might best be described as the inverse of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: a demolition of the federal government—FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, IRS—gone.
Ramaswamy radiates confidence: steady eye contact, knowing nod, satisfied smile. He campaigns for up to 18 hours a day. He mostly keeps to a uniform of black pants, black T-shirt, and a black blazer. He operates in a world of declarative statements and punctuates his sentences with “right?” and “actually,” like a tech bro. He’s currently in third place in most national polls. At last month’s Turning Point USA conference, in Florida, Ramaswamy had a breakout moment when 51 percent of straw-poll respondents said he was their second choice for president. “Pretty remarkable how far he’s come in a very short amount of time,” Charlie Kirk, the organization’s founder, tweeted.
Last week, leaked documents designed to inform Ron DeSantis’s strategy at Wednesday’s first presidential debate portrayed Ramaswamy as the candidate to beat. The Florida governor’s super PAC advised him to “take a sledgehammer” to the 38-year-old outsider. Many potential voters will likely be intrigued when they hear Ramaswamy speak his truths onstage this Wednesday. He is living a life they can only dream about: Start a company or two, make half a billion dollars, say whatever you want. And then, naturally, run for president.
The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on his phone after a taping of the PBS political talk show Firing Line With Margaret Hoover.
A colossal American flag hangs on the outside of Ramaswamy’s spare-no-expense campaign headquarters in Columbus. The property is a former barn; the word TRUTH is plastered everywhere. One communal work area, for phone banking, is roughly the size of a basketball court. He has his choice of two production studios from which to record his never-ending stream of cable-news hits, podcast appearances, and social-media videos.
During my visit, John Schnatter—a.k.a. Papa John—flew in from Kentucky via private helicopter to speak his truth on Ramaswamy’s own nascent podcast, The Vivek Show.
Papa John told the candidate how he became very rich—how his single pizza shop grew into a chain of over 5,000 stores—then turned to a long, complicated story about his downfall. He claims that he was set up by a PR firm that goaded him into saying a racial slur during a private coaching session and that this firm is connected to Hillary Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the PR firm referred me to a recent partial summary judgment against Schnatter in the firm’s favor.) He used the words “demonic” and “satanic” to describe the American left. At one point, the conversation veered toward Russia and Hunter Biden’s laptop. “I don’t know why the Creator put me through this,” Papa John said.
All the while, Ramaswamy nodded, smiled, or, when applicable, shook his head in disbelief. This was his media-forward candidacy, distilled: a morning behind the mic inside a posh podcast setup chatting with a fellow entrepreneur about the perils of woke capitalism. When the episode aired, he’d have a cautionary tale for listeners, a potentially viral clip that would get him in front of new voters.
The night before, I watched Ramaswamy speak to a couple hundred young conservatives at the Forge Leadership Summit. He looked around the room and preached that “hardship is not a choice, but victimhood is a choice.” It’s one of his favorite lines, and a nod to his second book, Nation of Victims. The crowd that night was almost exclusively white, and Ramaswamy’s inflection was temporarily suffused with twang.
“We’re starved for purpose and meaning and identity at a time in our national history when the things that used to fill our void—faith, patriotism, hard work, family—these things have disappeared,” he said. He rattled off a list of “poisons” that have filled the void, pausing for dramatic beats between each one: “Wokeism. Transgenderism. Climatism. COVIDism. Globalism. Depression. Anxiety. Fentanyl. Suicide.” The crowd murmured.
He kept rolling. He said that Russia’s war against Ukraine is “really just a battle between two thugs on the other side of Eastern Europe.” He warned that incremental change within American institutions is impossible.
Right now, he said, we have reached a “1776 moment” in this country.
“Do we stand on the side of reform?” he asked. “Or do we stand on the side of revolution?”
When he finished, half the people in the room jumped to their feet.
Vivek Ramaswamy with his son, Karthik, before speaking at a house party and fundraiser in Hubbard, Iowa.
Ramaswamy hurried out and ducked into an SUV: He feared he’d be late for his prime-time interview on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show. During the ride, he revisited one of the more challenging audience questions. A woman had asked if, as president, he would commit to making abortion illegal at the federal level. He told her that he is “unapologetically pro-life,” but a strict constitutionalist—an originalist. He said he viewed recent state-level abortion restrictions as victories for federalism. The woman seemed unsatisfied.
Ramaswamy knew that abortion questions would keep coming up. “I do feel like I’m being bullied a little bit on this issue,” he told his aides. They ran through his options. A video? A public address? Suddenly the subject seemed fraught. “Eh, probably an abortion speech isn’t a good idea, to be honest with you,” he said.
After the Cuomo interview, we drove to Ramaswamy’s house. It’s bright and white with giant ceilings—suburban palatial. One of the family’s two nannies appeared and started putting together a spread: chili, kale, watermelon salad, tofu tacos.
Throughout his professional life, Ramaswamy has aimed to be perceived as an American traditionalist who is simultaneously ahead of the curve. He is the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu. As a high-school student at St. Xavier, a Jesuit prep school in Cincinnati, he quickly got up to speed on all things Bible. On the campaign trail, he frequently invokes spirituality, and his message has the feel of old-school Christianity.
Growing up, he loved hip-hop, especially Eminem, and his own performances under his alter-ego “Da Vek” as a Harvard student landed him in The Crimson. He still occasionally leans into it. The day we met, he had just freestyled on Fox News. Earlier this month, he grabbed the mic and did an Eminem impression at the Iowa State Fair.
Though now running as a Republican, he long identified as a libertarian. He cast his first vote, when he was a 19-year-old, in the 2004 election, supporting the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. (He sat out every subsequent presidential election until 2020, when he voted for Trump.)
Ramaswamy told me a story about how in eighth grade, he was pushed down a flight of stairs at his public school. Though he underwent hip surgery afterward, he was careful not to portray himself as a victim. Instead, he described the event as the catalyst for his arrival at St. Xavier.
I asked him about coming of age in the post-9/11 world, when many ignorant Americans assumed that anyone with brown skin might be a terrorist. He told me about the experience of being singled out and questioned while flying to Israel—that unique sensation of being the last passenger permitted to board. “I didn’t chafe at that, though, because, honestly, in some ways it was data-driven,” he said. I asked if he considered the action itself to be racist. “No, I think racism has to involve some level of animus, actually,” he said. “I have experienced racism, to be clear. But that’s not—I don’t think that entails animus. So it doesn’t qualify as racism to me.”
He told me he doesn’t believe his race will negatively affect his electability in 2024. He said that among most GOP voters, the No. 1 political problem is “not, like, Arabs right now.” He spoke of what he saw as other underlying American anxieties, such as “the feeling of being victimized right here at home,” he said. “Forces that are different than Mohamed Atta,” he added, alluding to one of the 9/11 hijackers.
The entrepreneur and political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Republican Party of Iowa’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, which featured 13 Republican presidential hopefuls including former President Donald Trump.
Ramaswamy’s wife, Apoorva, was leaning on the kitchen island, listening to our conversation. After her husband slipped away to hop on a Zoom call with “a bunch of people from Silicon Valley,” she joined me at the table. She was fighting a cold but nonetheless happy to make time for a stranger in her home at nearly 10 p.m. on a weeknight. Besides, she said, she wanted to wait up for Vivek when he was done for the day.
The couple met at a house party in 2011, when they were both graduate students at Yale. They struck up conversation, realizing they were neighbors. Apoorva was following in her father’s footsteps, studying medicine, while Vivek was pursuing a law degree after a few years working in finance in New York. “He just seemed awesome, like someone who was interesting and someone who was full of life,” she said. “I was pretty sure pretty early on that I was going to probably end up marrying him.”
Apoorva, like her future husband, grew up a practicing Hindu. The couple is now raising their two toddlers, Karthik and Arjun, in the faith. Apoorva’s parents also came to the United States from India. “I think, as a child of immigrants, we defaulted toward being Democrats insofar as we thought about it at all, which was honestly not very much,” she said. In recent years, she told me, her mom and dad had become Trump supporters. “They chose this country—they love this country more than any country in the world, and they believe in it,” she said. “And it was cool” for them “to see someone who was unapologetic about it.”
I asked Apoorva if she could recall the first time Vivek told her he wanted to become president.
“I think that, like, on a serious level, it was …” she paused for a long moment. “This December.” Vivek, she said, saw the presidency as one of “the different options open to him.” Other young, rich men unsure of what to do next with their life have bought a yacht or a big-city newspaper, or run for governor of Texas. Ramaswamy chose the presidency.
Apoorva is a head-and-neck-cancer surgeon at the Ohio State University. I asked her if, as a physician, she supported vaccines. She told me that she and her entire family had received COVID shots, but like her husband, she endorses the idea of personal choice over government mandates. This libertarian approach permeates many aspects of their life. Instead of sending their kids to public school, they have “some educators who come to the house.” (She pointed to the special relationship between Alexander the Great and his private tutor, Aristotle, as a model.) Like Vivek, she’s ambitious and career-driven. She told me she doesn’t necessarily plan to give up her job at OSU even if her family moves into the White House. “I think Jill Biden did show that it is possible to be a spouse who is working,” she said.
“This is a totally new world for me, and the concept of being a political spouse is not, like, the fifth thing I would call myself,” she said. “It’s, you know, this is the thing we’re doing, for sure. And I’m proud to support my husband in it. But I think this is about him and his vision. This is not about me.”
The next day, in Des Moines, Ramaswamy periodically stepped away from our interview aboard his campaign bus to play with his older son, Karthik, who had come along for the trip. I asked Ramaswamy if his friends and family were surprised when he told them he was running for president.
“Not shocked, but a combination of excited and personally concerned for me, actually—just knowing how dirty this is,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising. And I think most people have an impression that politics is a dirty sport where you have to, you know, be compromised.”
I brought up something Papa John had told him: This wasn’t a knife fight, but a gunfight.
“I mean, I would phrase it differently, but I would say you need a spine of steel to play this sport, for sure,” Ramaswamy said. “Some people who have been coddled in their siloed kingdoms, mini kingdoms they’ve created for themselves, have not been ready for when they’ve shown up for the real thing. I think it was an advantage not to be surrounded by people who heaped false praise on me in one of the 50 states of the union—I think that’s a trap that certain governors almost every cycle have fallen into.”
He smiled, making it clear that he was going out of his way not to invoke his closest rival, Ron DeSantis, by name.
While DeSantis spent the first stretch of his campaign blackballing the mainstream media, Ramaswamy has taken a different approach. His presidential candidacy was preceded by a profile in The New Yorker, and though he himself is perpetually on cable news, he said he hardly ever tunes in. With one exception: “I think Tucker Carlson was great, actually. I really enjoyed watching him.”
“I think Tucker had something to say,” he said. “We’re not slaves to a partisan orthodoxy. I don’t have a particular affinity for the Republican Party apparatus, and I think neither does Tucker.”
He told me he admired how Carlson wasn’t a “delivery mechanism” for something that showed up on the teleprompter. I asked if he had read any of the evidence that came out in the discovery process of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, the case that ultimately led to Carlson leaving the network. “I really didn’t,” Ramaswamy said. “It didn’t strike me as super interesting because it seemed like a lot of inside baseball.” I told him that Carlson had been saying certain things on air and, in some cases, texting the direct opposite to his producer. For instance: He said he hates Trump. “Did he say that?” Ramaswamy asked.
For a moment, he seemed genuinely surprised.
The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a live event with Elon Musk and David Sacks on X Spaces (formerly known as Twitter).
“Most people have barely heard of me,” Ramaswamy admitted to Elon Musk. He was pacing barefoot around his 30th-floor downtown–Des Moines hotel room, doing a live Twitter (X) Spaces broadcast. It was late Friday afternoon, just a few hours before the Lincoln Dinner. Half-eaten takeout was idling in clamshell containers. Ramaswamy had been going nonstop but didn’t seem remotely tired.
Musk and his Silicon Valley friend David Sacks had been trying to make the social network’s shaky audio platform a virtual destination on the 2024 campaign trail, with intermittent success. I could hear Musk’s voice through Ramaswamy’s earbuds. Over and over again, he’d interrupt the candidate. If Ramaswamy was frustrated, he didn’t let it show. After having watched several of his media hits in a row, I noticed how Ramaswamy had developed an array of tricks to wrangle attention, such as when he brought up “our mutual friend Peter,” as in Thiel. He told Musk how much he “loved” the Twitter Files. By the end of the broadcast, he seemed to have made a new fan. Last week, Musk called him “a very promising candidate.”
He continues to find support among a group of very online iconoclasts. “That Vivek guy is very interesting,” Joe Rogan said recently. “He’s very rational and very smart.” Jordan Peterson has praised him as “hard to corner in the best way.” Andrew Yang, who ran as a freethinking businessman in the 2020 Democratic primary, told me he believes that people are just waiting for others to rally behind Ramaswamy. “Vivek’s going to have his moment. There’s going to be a wind at his back. And then when that wind hits, I think people will be stunned at how quickly his support grows.”
At the Iowa Events Center, more than 1,000 people listened politely as 13 Republican candidates (pretty much the entire field except Chris Christie) each made a 10-minute case for themselves. DeSantis announced that “The time for excuses is over!” before clomping away in his heeled boots. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina preached the value of hard work, telling the room that President Joe Biden and the left were selling “a narcotic of despair.” Former Vice President Mike Pence trudged through his speech and received hardly any applause when endorsing the idea of a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Just after 8 p.m., Ramaswamy was waiting offstage, looking over his notes. He bounded up the steps to the sounds of Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America.”
“It’s good to be here, back in Iowa. I feel like I live here now!” Ramaswamy told the crowd.
He was speaking slower than usual, and he had ditched the twang from the previous night. He seemed utterly at ease. He talked about securing our southern border “and our northern border too.” He received lively applause after saying he would shut down scores of three-letter government agencies. He cycled through his list of poisons and his 10 truths. The clapping waxed and waned. His line about “two genders” was a hit, as was his finale about the Constitution. All in all, he received one of the strongest responses of the night: When the speech concluded, he was treated to a partial standing ovation. He paused for a few extra moments to take it all in, waving at the crowd with both hands.
Downstairs, Ramaswamy glowed in his after-party suite. “Eye of the Tiger” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” and a series of country songs blared from speakers. He told the few dozen people before him that he was prepared not only to win the nomination but to deliver a Ronald Reagan–style landslide victory. Some seemed convinced.
The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy leaves American Dream Machines after he and his son, Karthik, visited the vintage-car shop between campaign events. Ramaswamy’s son joined the candidate on the two-day campaign trip to Iowa.
The next morning, as his campaign bus lumbered to rural Hubbard, I asked Ramaswamy if he had heard what his fellow Republican Will Hurd had said at the event. Hurd, a former Texas congressman, was booed off the stage after telling the Lincoln Dinner crowd “the truth”: that Trump was running only to stay out of prison. “I know the truth,” Hurd said. (Loud boos.) “The truth is hard.” (Louder boos.)
Ramaswamy waved away Hurd’s assertion. He told me that if Trump weren’t running, “they” wouldn’t be prosecuting him. With each passing month, with each new indictment, Ramaswamy has doubled down on his public promise to pardon Trump if elected. He told me that he believes doing so would be “the right thing for the country.” He said the indictments, so far, were “obviously politically motivated.”
During one of his “truth” monologues at the Lincoln Dinner, Ramaswamy told the crowd, “We can handle the truth about what really happened on January 6.” As the bus rolled north, I asked him: What is the truth about January 6?
“I don’t know, but we can handle it,” he said. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?”
Then, suddenly, he was talking about 9/11.
“I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to. Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of,” he said. “‘Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who are unarmed.’ What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right?”
I pressed him on the comparison, and suddenly, the bold teller of truths was just asking questions. “Oh yeah, I don’t think they belong in the same conversation,” he said. “I think it’s a ridiculous comparison. But I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the January 6 commission.”
But is he actually confused about who was behind the 9/11 attacks? It was hard to get a straight answer from him. “I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11,” he said. “I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.” Some truths, it seems, can be proudly affirmed; others are more elusive. (Asked to clarify Ramaswamy’s views on 9/11, his spokesperson pointed me to a 1,042-word tweet from the candidate, in which he suggested that the U.S. government covered up involvement by Saudi intelligence officials in planning the attacks.)
Ramaswamy told me he’s not interested in being Trump’s vice president, or serving in Trump’s Cabinet. “Reporting in to somebody is not something I’m wired to do well,” he said. “I’m not in this to be a politician. I think there’s a chance to lead a national revival, cultural revival, that touches the next generation of Americans. I don’t think I’m going to be in a position to do that if I’m in an administrative role.”
Unlike Trump, Ramaswamy has signed the “loyalty pledge” to support the eventual GOP nominee—a prerequisite for participation in the debate. He also told me that he would commit to accepting the results of the election. So far, the closest he’s come to ever actually criticizing Trump is saying that 30 percent of the country became “psychiatrically ill” when he was in office. Throughout our discussions, it was clear that Ramaswamy seemed to view Trumpism as something he could tap into. He told me that his path to winning involved recognizing and celebrating Trump’s accomplishments, and promising to build on them.
“I believe with a high degree of conviction that I will win this election,” he said.
If, for whatever reason, that didn’t come to pass, he told me he would “probably just go back to what I was doing”—business, writing books, hanging out with his family. “And I might take a look at the future.”
During our final conversation, I asked Ramaswamy if he felt understood or misunderstood as a candidate. He didn’t hesitate to answer.
“Mostly misunderstood.”
What do you think people misunderstand about you?
“My motivations,” he said.
“I’m not aggrieved by that. I’m patient. But I hope that by the end of this, actually—it’s a deep question—but I think I would rather be properly understood and lose because people decided that the real me is not who they want, than to lose because people never got to know who I really am. That would bother me. And it would be hard to reconcile myself with that. But if people across this country really know just who I am and what I stand for, and then that’s not what they want in a leader, I am 100 percent at peace with that. I have no problem. So that’s kind of my goal in this process.”
The bus pulled onto a sprawling private property in the middle of nowhere. Ramaswamy and his aides hopped off. The millionaire outsider candidate, beholden to no one, was preparing to speak his truth before a wealthy Iowa donor and his friends.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a tall man with tall hair. And last week, when he stood in front of a crowd in Iowa wearing a black T-shirt under a black blazer, he looked like Johnny Bravo delivering a TED Talk.
“We’re not gonna be angry tonight,” Ramaswamy told a few hundred Iowa voters before calmly explaining his theory of how America got to be so politically divided. The country is going through a national identity crisis, he explained, and people are turning toward “racial wokeism” and “radical gender ideology” to fill the emptiness inside. It’s Republicans’ job to fill that void, Ramaswamy said, “with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes the woke poison to irrelevance.”
The 37-year-old businessman turned political candidate, who seemed to appear out of nowhere on the campaign trail, is now suddenly everywhere—including tied for third in GOP primary polling and, on Thursday night, at a campaign stop in the Des Moines metro area. The setting was industrial chic: an ultra-modern flooring-and-appliance store with exposed piping, broad glass windows, and huge whirring fans overhead. The crowd of Republican voters mingled between shiny model stoves and porcelain-tile displays, waiting to hear from Ramaswamy and a lineup of other speakers including Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds.
As Ramaswamy had promised, the evening’s vibe was not pessimistic or angry. He and the other speakers echoed some familiar Trumpian culture-war and “America First” themes. But the event lacked the gloom and doom of a Trump rally; there was no ominous string music or rambling soliloquy of personal grievance. Clearly an appetite, however small, exists for Ramaswamy’s bouncy, fresh brand of Trumpism.
The voters there may once have liked or even loved Trump, but honestly, they’re a little tired of his negativity. They know that Trump is the current primary front-runner; they might even vote for him again. But Iowa voters, who’ve long relished their power of first presidential pick, like to keep their options open, and they’re intrigued by Ramaswamy. “His youthful optimism is a really good thing,” Rob Johnson, a lawyer from Des Moines, told me. He voted for Trump twice, but he’s ready for something new. Trump “brings an element into [politics] that is not productive. You get more with an ounce of sugar than you do with a pound of vinegar.”
Ramaswamy, who was born and raised in Cincinnati, is the kind of entrepreneur whose actual job you can’t quite put your finger on. He got his law degree from Yale and founded a biopharma company called Roivant Sciences in 2014. He’s been brawling in the culture-war trenches for a while. In 2022, he started an investment firm explicitly opposed to the ESG framework, which involves incorporating environmental, social, and governance issues into business strategy. He’s written books called Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam and, more recently, Nation of Victims, which urges Americans to “pursue excellence” and “reject victimhood culture.”
The Millennial candidate is a bit like the GOP version of Andrew Yang: a get-up-and-go business bro who does something vague in the new economy, and who seemed to wake up one day and ask himself, Why not run for president? Ramaswamy has been all over Iowa since announcing his candidacy 12 weeks ago on Tucker Carlson’s now-canceled Fox News show. A national CBS poll of likely GOP primary voters showed Ramaswamy tied with former Vice President Mike Pence for third place behind Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—albeit a distant third, at 5 percent.
On Thursday, Ramaswamy was introduced by a parade of joyful Republican culture warriors, who stood onstage while a loop of Fox News clips played from a projector in the back of the room. The Dallas County GOP chair performatively discarded an empty box of Bud Lite, a brand that’s drawn the ire of conservatives for its partnership with a transgender influencer. And the crowd applauded wildly as former State Senator Jake Chapman checked off a list of successful or in-progress Republican projects: banning obscene material in school libraries; pushing for a statewide bill banning abortion after six weeks; Don Lemon getting the axe over at CNN. The cheers rang loudest for the last.
Ramaswamy’s stump speech was a plea for people to resist the “cults” of race, gender, and climate—and a call to redefine what it means to be an American. That redefinition would apparently involve a few constitutional amendments and a lot of executive power. As president, he told the crowd, he’d end affirmative action and shut down the Department of Education. He’d boost the national Republican Party by telling Americans to “drill, frack, burn coal, and embrace nuclear.” He’d send the military to patrol the southern border instead of defending “somebody else’s border in God knows where.” He’d shut down the FBI and give a gun to every adult in Taiwan to defend themselves against China. He’d prohibit young people from voting unless they performed national service or passed a citizenship test. He’d ban TikTok for kids younger than 16.
Ramaswamy left his listeners with a rosy takeaway: “The bipartisan consensus in this country right now is that we are a nation in decline. I actually think we’re a little young. We’re going through our own version of adolescence, figuring out who we’re really going to be.”
The New York Times has called Ramaswamy a “smooth-talking Republican who’d rule by fiat,” and the candidate was proud enough of the headline to put it on his website. At the Iowa event, nobody seemed alarmed by his plans for the country. On the contrary, they were excited. They’d come to the event expecting a rote political speech from a random nobody; instead, they got a grab bag of new ideas and a blast of energy they haven’t been seeing on the national political stage, where the current president is 80 and the former is 76.
“I was very impressed,” Ree Foster, a two-time Trump voter from West Des Moines, told me. “I like Vivek’s attitude much better than Trump’s.” Tate Snodgrass, a 24-year-old from Burlington, remains a Trump fan. Still, he heard something from Ramaswamy that he hasn’t from Trump. “Vivek is like, ‘I don’t even care about the political parties. This is an American ideal,’ which I found really appealing,” Snodgrass told me. “I wasn’t expecting to be wowed—but he wowed me.”
Ramaswamy, who is Indian American, spoke before a mostly white crowd, in an overwhelmingly white state, and received a notably warm reception. Unlike the Democratic Party, which has shuffled the order of its primary season and demoted the Iowa caucus, Iowa Republicans have kept their first-place spot in the nomination process. Some are confident that Hawkeye State voters can work magic for Ramaswamy the way they did for the little-known outsider candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976—or Barack Obama in 2008.
Still, Ramaswamy is a long shot to win the primary; most GOP voters back the former president, who leads by double digits. Although DeSantis is still polling in second place, the conventional wisdom that the Florida governor is the natural heir to Trump has deflated in recent weeks, given his marked deficit of charisma on the campaign trail. But Ramaswamy’s surprisingly high numbers suggest that maybe a shinier, younger, and more animated “America First”–style politics can still be competitive—or at least disruptive—in the age of Trump.
