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Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Vivek Ramaswamy arrived in Wisconsin with a target on his back. “The knives are out,” his senior advisor Tricia McLaughlin told me before the debate, “but he’s ready.”
The entrepreneur was one of eight Republicans to clash on the stage of the Fiserv Forum amid a heatwave — temperatures broke 100 in the late afternoon. Along with him, Fox News hosted second-favorite Ron DeSantis, former vice president Mike Pence, a hobbled North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, anti-Trump spoilers Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, happy-go-lucky South Carolina senator Tim Scott and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley. Donald Trump cast a shadow over the whole affair in his absence — opting to skip the debate against the candidates he leads by dozens of points in the polls and instead counter-program by pre-taping an interview on X (formerly Twitter) with ousted Fox host Carlson.
Ramaswamy introduced himself as a “skinny kid with a funny name” — à la Barack Obama from 2007 — and an “entrepreneur” rather than a politician. He talked up his immigrant background and mentioned how he and his wife had raised their children “following our faith in God,” an obscure reference to his Hindu faith.
Pence was the first to tweak Vivek, for a previous statement that “a president can’t do everything.” Ramaswamy responded with a scatter-gun fire of policies. Pence ridiculed his inexperience, saying, “Now is not the time for on the job training — we don’t need to bring in a rookie.” Vivek changed tack, drawing a dichotomy between everyone else on stage — “super PAC puppets” uttering “pre-prepared lines” and what he claimed to embody: “revolution.”
Later, Vivek baited the whole stage: “I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” he said to loud boos in the auditorium (occupied by Republican donors and consultants, among others). This time, it was Chris Christie’s turn to punch. “I’ve had enough of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT,” he said, before bringing up the earlier Obama comparison. “Give me a hug,” Vivek jibed back, referencing the governor’s notorious embrace with the former president.
After Ramaswamy offered a solid law-and-order response — about backing law enforcement, tackling mental health and addressing the national sense of ennui — Pence came at him again. “We’re not looking for the new national identity,” he mocked. But Vivek doubled down: “It is not morning in America. We are in a dark moment. We’re in a cold cultural civil war.”
Christie and Ramaswamy locked horns later over — unsurprisingly — Donald Trump, after Baier asked candidates by a show of hands whether they would back Trump as Republican nominee. Christie recalled Vivek’s earlier commitment to law and order and drew him into a messy and out-of-control back-and-forth — after which Baier had to regain order of the crowd.
Vivek brought another scrap upon himself by mentioning his pledge to pardon the former president on day one — and asked if Pence would do the same.
And he earned applause from the room for being the only candidate on stage to unequivocally pledge to not send any more money to Ukraine. In his elaborate response he mocked other candidates for journeying to Kyiv to visit “their pope Zelensky” while not securing America’s southern border. Pence replied that Vivek lacked ambition if he thought that America couldn’t address problems at home and be the leader of the free world. “We can do both, Vivek.”
“Ukraine is not a priority for the United States of America,” Ramaswamy said in response, describing the conflict as a “no-win war.”
Haley, in a move telegraphed by her pre-debate statements, gained a rapturous response in the room for not backing Israel to the hilt and telling Ramaswamy, “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.” The start of his rebuttal was almost completely drowned out by the applause.
“To come out as the winner tonight when it was my first ever political debate is something that, frankly, exceeded even my own expectations,” Vivek told a gaggle of reporters in the spin room afterwards. “I think the race really just started tonight. And I think it’s going to be a quick path to getting to a two-horse race between Trump and myself.”
He seemed to relish his various spats. “Tonight was a night where I didn’t attack anybody unless I was attacked first,” he said. “But as you saw, at least three to four different establishment politicians had their fire trained on me. I think that that’s what you would expect when an outsider comes in and threatens the existing establishment.”
His senior advisor McLaughlin was equally buoyant. “Vivek Ramaswamy 1, establishment GOP candidates 0. It was Vivek versus everybody else,” she told The Spectator in the spin room. “He showed dominance tonight that I think skeptics didn’t think he could deliver — and he absolutely proved them wrong.”
Congressman Byron Donalds, a Trump surrogate, seemed amused by his scrappy performance: “Vivek out-Chris Christied Chris Christie.”
In the week leading up to the debate, a dossier of suggested debate attack points for DeSantis was posted on the website of Jeff Roe’s Axiom Strategies — who heads up the Florida governor’s Never Back Down PAC. (Somehow the points found their way to the New York Times last week — funny how that happens, isn’t it?) Third on the agenda: “hammer Vivek Ramaswamy in a response.” The Times drew an intriguing conclusion from the suggestion: “for Republican rivals looking for a target who isn’t the front-runner, Donald J. Trump, Mr. Ramaswamy could be an inviting one.” Yet it was Christie, Haley and Pence who went on the attack: not the man he’s closest to in the polls.
In the days that followed the Times story, the upstart entrepreneur copped a load of flak. He raised hackles on the right by telling the Free Beacon that in 2028 he hoped to see an Israel that would “not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment” from the US. The Nation razzed his “edgelord foreign policy”; a sample quote: “some of his ideas do offer a dose of shock value, but that’s because they’re blatantly stupid or irresponsible.” CNN contributor Bakari Sellers called him the “biggest clown in the circus”
And the pre-debate criticism wasn’t just coming from from the media: Haley — a candidate who, like DeSantis, has a reason to try and “attack Trump without attacking Trump,” in order to cream voters off him — said Vivek’s “foreign policy proposals have a common theme: they make America less safe.” Mike Pence also slammed him for his less than stellar commitment to Israel.
Vivek began his campaign as a cable-news candidate, announcing on Carlson’s Fox News, before jetting off to New Hampshire to press flesh, where I shadowed him for the first day of his campaign. He did four TV hits and was constantly speaking to reporters while on the move. His aggressive media strategy has continued, which a recent Politico profile described as “what it takes to go from zero percent in the GOP primary polls in February to 7 percent today.”
“The reason we can do massive amounts of media is because Vivek just speaks his convictions and his principles,” McLaughlin said in the spin room. “We have that luxury that a lot of other candidates don’t, because they are fed talking points from memos and then they have to regurgitate them.”
At a town hall on the first day of his campaign, Vivek made a point of saying “I believe in answering questions, I’m gonna answer the question.” And doubtless he has more issues with consistency than, say, a Mike Pence or Tim Scott. But for good or ill, he was the standout of the debate — in Trump’s absence, of course. Like his political godfather, Vivek posed the question, “who needs consistency when you can bring the noise?”
He came to Milwaukee with one job, his advisor McLaughlin said: “to introduce himself to the American people.” Boy did he.
