No one was surprised that Vivek Ramaswamy decided to suspend his campaign for the presidency after his poor showing in Iowa. Although he was by far the most rhetorically nimble of the GOP candidates, it had long been clear that this was not his moment. His showing in the Iowa Caucus—he came in a distant fourth with about 7 percent—quantified that truth.
Not that Vivek is going anywhere. He will not be the GOP presidential candidate in 2024. But by immediately suspending his campaign and enthusiastically endorsing Donald Trump after Trump’s stunning, blow-out victory in Iowa, Vivek guaranteed that he would have an important role to play in Trump’s campaign and, should Trump be reelected, in the second Trump administration.
The New York Times did not like that Vivek endorsed Trump. Veteran readers of our former paper of record can already tell from the headline and subhead of the story that reported the news. “Vivek Ramaswamy, Wealthy Political Novice Who Aligned With Trump, Quits Campaign.” “Wealthy,” eh? “Quits,” you say? Beginning rhetoricians should be set the task of rewriting that headline for some progressive plutocrat. Then they should try their hand at rewriting the subhead: “A self-funding entrepreneur, Mr. Ramaswamy peaked in late August but deflated under attack from his rivals. He dropped out after the Iowa caucuses and endorsed Donald J. Trump.”
I think it was a writer for Time magazine who, back in the day, illustrated the point by noting the difference in tone between “Truman slunk from the room to huddle with his cronies” and “Ike strode from the chamber to confer with his advisors.” Truman and Ike were doing the same thing, but the description of their activities cast them in very different rhetorical spaces. The Times obviously had Vivek slated for a Truman-like role.
Consider the first sentence of the story: “Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old entrepreneur and political newcomer who briefly made a splash with brash policy proposals and an outsize sense of confidence, dropped out of the race for the Republican White House nomination after a disappointing fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.” “Newcomer,” “briefly,” “brash,” “outsize,” “disappointing.” You see where this is going.
But the real meat of the story in the Times begins a few paragraphs later.
Mr. Ramaswamy had embraced increasingly apocalyptic conspiracy theories; spoke of a “system” that would block Mr. Trump from office and install a “puppet,” Nikki Haley; called the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “inside job” orchestrated by federal law enforcement; and begun trafficking in the racist theory of “replacement” that holds falsely that Democrats are importing immigrants of color to supplant white people.
Question for the class: Is a theory that is “apocalyptic” necessarily untrue? How about a “conspiracy theory?” As I have noted previously, when Calpurnia and the soothsayer warned Julius Caesar about a conspiracy against his life, all they had was a theory. But then came the Ides of March, and the theory turned out to be true.
I assume that the reporter is correct that Vivek used the terms “system” and “puppet” to describe the forces that are marshaling to keep Trump from reassuming office and catapult someone more pliable and favored by the neo-con/deep-state alliance into the top spot instead. But however you want to describe the machinations of the deep state, it is quite clear that those sneering scare quote marks are entirely misplaced.
How about the quotation marks around “inside job” to describe the January 6 protest at the Capitol? I submit that the more we learn, the more the idea that it was largely an inside job fomented by various federal agencies seems plausible. Six or seven months after it happened, I gave a talk called “The January 6 Insurrection Hoax.” It turns out that I didn’t know the half of it. Julie Kelly, Darren Beattie, Tucker Carlson, and others have shown that the events of that day were at least in part orchestrated by government agents. (There were so many feds in and about the Capitol that day that the FBI lost track of the number.)
Again, what about the “Great Replacement” theory? Is it a “racist” fantasy, as the Times says? Or are those millions and millions of illegal trespassers who have poured over what used to be our southern border in fact welcomed here precisely because Democratic politicians see them as embryo Democratic voters (and part of the great welfare symbiosis upon which the perpetuation of the Democratic Party depends)?
The Times reporter goes on to say that Vivek’s embrace of Donald Trump’s “MAGA” agenda would mean “immediately eliminating the Department of Education, F.B.I., and Internal Revenue Service by executive order, cutting the federal work force by 75 percent in a mass layoff, without Congress’s approval, and pulling back America’s foreign military commitments, . . .”
This is true. I would call it a feature, not a bug, and so would scores of millions of American voters.
That, of course, is the reality that that Times reporter and the bubble-dwelling apparatchiks he huddles with cannot wrap their heads around. They are Davos-loving, Klaus-Schwab-admiring globalists. They are powerful, yes, but their number is small, and their true intentions are being exposed everywhere. Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, speaking last week at the World Economic Forum, put it well with a quotation from Javier Milei, the new president of Argentina: he had come not to guide sheep but to awaken lions.
That’s what Vivek Ramaswamy is about. Donald Trump, too. The New York Times doesn’t get it. That’s one more reason why it is an increasingly parochial publication that speaks only to a shrinking coterie of pampered, irrelevant dittoheads.