He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax, supports Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and would gladly pardon Donald Trump on day 1 of his would-be presidency. A wealthy biotech entrepreneur, the 38-year-old has never before run for public office.
Despite all of this (or maybe because of it), this week’s Republican debate became a national coming-out party for Vivek Ramaswamy.
Suddenly, this inexperienced and dangerous showoff is almost a household name.
Many in the Republican base ate up his showmanship and blatant fanboying of their hero, Donald Trump. In CNN’s post-debate focus group of Republican voters in Iowa, for example, Ramaswamy got the most favorable response.
Trump publicly applauded him. And many in the mainstream media declared him victorious. The Washington Post put him up high in its “winners” column, trailing only behind Donald Trump, who notably wasn’t even there. (Choosing not to enter this particular clown car showed some uncharacteristic good sense on the former president’s part.)
The New York Times analyzed the situation under a glowing headline “How Vivek Ramaswamy Broke Through: Big Swings With a Smile”, with emphasis on his style: “unchecked confidence and insults”.
For this millennial tech bro, his performance on the Fox News stage in Milwaukee couldn’t have gone much better.
As a glimpse of America’s future, it couldn’t have gone much worse.
“If you have wondered what Trumpism after Trump looks like, ask no further,” suggested the magazine writer David Freedlander on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. His prediction accompanied a debate stage photo of Ramaswamy with clenched fist.
Certainly, he has the essentials covered. No, not foreign policy chops or a background in public service, but a mocking aversion to social justice and equality.
The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, may talk a good anti-woke game but Ramaswamy wrote the book. His Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, published in 2021, takes aim at the nation’s “new secular religions like Covid-ism, climate-ism and gender ideology”.
His night in the spotlight, and its aftermath, shows that neither Republican voters nor many in the mainstream media have learned much since Trump came down the elevator in 2015 and proceeded to wreak havoc on the country.
In case there was any doubt, now we know: they will always fall for the attention-seeking, the policy-unencumbered, the candidate quickest with a demeaning insult. That’s a “winner”, apparently.
And it’s all too familiar.
“Ramaswamy is like Trump in the larva stage, molting toward the full Maga wingspan but not quite there yet,” wrote Frank Bruni in his New York Times newsletter. “His narcissism, though, is fully evolved.”
If Ramaswamy’s real aim – other than to bask in his own glorious reflection – is to get Trump to choose him as his running mate, he made progress toward that end.
The day before surrendering to Georgia officials on Thursday, the 91-times-indicted former president found time to praise the newcomer’s onstage statements. He was particularly pleased, of course, by Ramaswamy’s labeling Trump as “the best president of the 21st century”.
Faint-praise alert: there have been only three others, and two – Barack Obama and Joe Biden – are Democrats. But no matter, since rapturous approval, especially in superlative form – “the hugest inaugural crowd”, etc – has always been the way to Trump’s heart, such as it is.
“This answer gave Vivek Ramaswamy a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH,” Trump gushed in a social media post.
Not everyone in the media, of course, was buying it. Charlie Sykes, editor in chief of the right-leaning Bulwark, was blunt, calling Ramaswamy “facile, clownish, shallow, shameless, pandering”, but, then again, “exactly what GOP voters crave these days”.
Given that the Republican party – still firmly in the grip of a twice-impeached con man – has lost its mind, this craving makes a certain amount of sense.
But it makes the endless media normalization even more cringe-inducing. Shouldn’t mainstream journalists be able to step back a tiny bit, providing critical distance rather than the same old tricks?
How can there be “winners” in yet another milestone on the way to fascism?
Losers? That’s easier. I think we already know who they are: Americans who care about democracy.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
