politics

In today’s newsletter: the 38-year-old entrepreneur has emerged as the most potent threat to Donald Trump in the GOP’s bid for the White House. But what does he stand for?

Good morning. It’s more than a year until Americans choose their next president, but the race to be the Republican nominee is well under way. Their frontrunner is some guy called Donald Trump – you’ve probably heard of him. The one with the mugshot.

But today we are looking at the 38-year-old “anti-woke” tech bro who could end up being Trump’s greatest rival. Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, was widely viewed as the “winner” of the first Republican TV debate last week. Selling himself as “a patriot who speaks the truth”, he called the climate change agenda a “hoax” and promised “revolution” rather than “incremental reform”. Oh, and he vowed that one of his first acts as president would be to pardon Trump for whatever he may have been convicted of by then. Lovely stuff.

So does this bumptious upstart stand a chance at getting the Republican nomination? And could youth win over experience if he ends up going head-to-head with Joe Biden in 2024? In today’s newsletter, I discuss all this and more with Dr Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the US and Americas programme at the thinktank Chatham House.

In depth: ‘Is Trump’s base really going to grab on to someone who doesn’t look like them?’

Who is Vivek Ramaswamy?

Born in Ohio in 1985, Ramaswamy is the son of Indian Hindu immigrants, just like the UK’s own Rishi Sunak. Ramaswamy’s mother worked as a geriatric psychiatrist; his father was an engineer and a patent lawyer at General Electric.

Unlike the UK prime minister, “Ramaswamy made his own money – he didn’t marry into it”, says Dr Leslie Vinjamuri. He founded the biotechnology firm Roivant Sciences, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars with bold claims about an Alzheimer’s drug which, well, ultimately failed its clinical trial. Ramaswamy still got rich, though, taking out at least $200m (£159m) from the company, according to the New York Times.

Remind you of anyone? Like Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout in jail for defrauding investors with her useless blood-testing company, Ramaswamy has also featured on the cover of Forbes magazine. They called him “The 30-year-old CEO conjuring drug companies from thin air.” To be clear: First Edition is not suggesting the presidential hopeful is guilty of criminal fraud, just that he shares the same talent for self-publicity as Holmes.

Despite styling himself as an anti-establishment outsider, he went to Harvard, where he studied biology and performed libertarian-themed rap music under the alter ego “Da Vek”. Like Kendall at Logan’s birthday party, Ramaswamy is prone to spitting bars in public – often by Eminem, who has asked him to cease and desist using his music on the campaign trail.

What does Ramaswamy believe in?

These are Ramaswamy’s “10 truths”, according to his campaign website: “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 US government, not four. The US constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.”

Ramaswamy, the bestselling author of 2021’s Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, wants to see a much smaller state, and has promised to abolish most federal agencies, including the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has called the climate crisis agenda a “hoax”, saying that while he accepts the climate is changing (which he says was ever thus), policies to address it “have little to do with climate change and more to do with penalising the west as a way to achieve global ‘equity’”.

Does he have a chance?

“He is certainly a contender,” says Vinjamuri. “I mean, right now, nobody’s a serious contender because Trump is sailing so far ahead. But any number of things could happen to Trump, and if one of those things happens, then Vivek Ramaswamy is the person who has captured front and centre of the GOP debates. He was the one everyone on stage wanted to put down. And that usually happens when somebody looks like a real threat.”

Will Trump ultimately secure the Republican nomination? “There’s nothing self evident that would rule him out,” she says. There are not many eligibility requirements for US presidents and a criminal record doesn’t disqualify someone from the race, so in theory, yes. But it’d be pretty difficult to campaign from prison.

If Trump is stopped it will not be “because someone says it’s illegal for him to stand, but because somebody makes the calculation that the public opinion is moving against him – too many indictments, trials, all these legal proceedings – and he is becoming less interesting and somebody else is taking the stage.”

Could Ramaswamy be that somebody? He is currently third in the polls, with Trump flying higher than ever on 49.2%. Meanwhile, Trump’s onetime nearest rival – Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who was polling 40% in January – loses support almost every time he opens his mouth. He is now down to 14.19%, with Ramaswamy next on 10.1%.

“A lot of it is going to come down to: where do people put their money?” says Vinjamuri. Ramaswamy has high-profile support from rightwing billionaires including PayPal founder Peter Thiel, as my colleague Martin Pengelly has reported.

Vinjamuri is not convinced that Ramaswamy, as the “dark-skinned son of an immigrant”, will be able to appeal to Trump’s base. “They’ll like his anti-climate, anti-woke rhetoric,” she says. “But are they really going to grab on to someone who doesn’t looks like them? The Republican party has been so dominated by a man who has peddled white nationalism, who has been racist in his rhetoric.”

Can he beat Biden?

“General elections are won in the swing states,” says Vinjamuri. “And the Democrats are not gonna swing to Ramaswamy because on every issue he is just so far away from them.”

Joe Biden has declared his candidacy, despite more than three-quarters of respondents in a new US poll saying he would be too old to be effective if re-elected president next year, when he will be 81.

“The view in the Democratic camp is that if it’s going to be Trump, it needs to be Biden. But if it’s Ramaswamy, what about Pete Buttigieg?” she says, referring to Biden’s 41-year-old secretary of state for transport, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020. “If Trump exits the scene, everything becomes an open question.”

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