Ramaswamy, Vivek (1985- )

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      G.O.P. Faces Trump Indictment: Loyalty or Law and Order

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      The candidates challenging Donald Trump have to decide how to run against the indicted former president. And it could determine where the party goes from here.The federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump has left the Republican Party — and his rivals for the party’s nomination — with a stark choice between deferring to a system of law and order that has been central to the party’s identity for half a century or a more radical path of resistance, to the Democratic Party in power and to the nation’s highest institutions that Mr. Trump now derides.How the men and women who seek to lead the party into the 2024 election respond to the indictments of the former president in the coming months will have enormous implications for the future of the G.O.P.So far, the declared candidates for the presidency who are not Mr. Trump have divided into three camps regarding his federal indictment last Thursday: those who have strongly backed him and his insistence that the indictment is a politically driven means to deny him a second White House term, such as Vivek Ramaswamy; those who have urged Americans to take the charges seriously, such as Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson; and those who have straddled both camps, condemning the indictment but nudging voters to move past Mr. Trump’s leadership, such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.The trick, for all of Mr. Trump’s competitors, will be finding the balance between harnessing the anger of the party’s core voters who remain devoted to him while winning their support as an alternative nominee.Mr. Trump is due to appear in court on Tuesday in Florida. The danger for Republicans, after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is that encouraging too much anger could lead to chaos — and to what pollsters call the “ghettoization” of their party: confined to minority status by voters unwilling to let go of the fervent beliefs that have been rejected by the majority.That point was laid bare Sunday by a new CBS News/YouGov poll that found 80 percent of Americans outside the core Republican voter base saw a national security risk in Mr. Trump’s handling of classified nuclear and military documents, while only 38 percent of likely Republican primary voters discerned such a risk.In the same poll, only 7 percent of Republicans said the indictment had changed their view of the former president for the worse; 14 percent said their views had changed for the better; and the majority, 61 percent, said their views would not change. More than three-quarters of Republican primary voters said the indictments were politically motivated.A separate ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that 61 percent of Americans viewed the charges as serious, up from 52 percent in April when pollsters asked about the mishandling of classified documents. Among Republicans, 38 percent said the charges were serious, also up, from 21 percent in this spring. But only about half of Americans said Mr. Trump should be charged, unchanged from April.“Base voters see the double standard in politics. I continue to hear, ‘When are they going to indict the Bidens?’” said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman and senior adviser to Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. But, he added, “65 percent of our primary voters are just tired of all the drama and I think are looking for a new generation of Republicans to take us out of the wilderness.”Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, campaigning in Iowa early this year. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMs. Haley has embodied that balancing act, saying in one statement, “This is not how justice should be pursued in our country,” and also, “It’s time to move beyond the endless drama.”Mr. Trump’s closest rival for the 2024 nomination, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, captured the same spirit when he mused on Friday that he “would have been court-martialed in a New York minute” if he had taken classified documents during his service in the Navy. He was referring to Hillary Clinton — who has returned as a Republican boogeyman this week — and her misuse of classified material as secretary of state, but the double meaning was clear, just as it was when he said, “There needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let’s enforce it on everybody.”Those urging voters to read the charges facing Mr. Trump — the mishandling of highly classified documents on some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and his subsequent steps to obstruct law enforcement — are a lonelier group in the broader Republican Party. Just two former governors running for president — both former prosecutors — Mr. Christie of New Jersey and Mr. Hutchinson of Arkansas, are aligned with a scattering of other leaders like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who was the only Republican senator to vote to remove Mr. Trump from office twice.But their voices are likely to be amplified in the coming days by a media eager to give them a microphone. Mr. Christie will hold a town-hall meeting on CNN on Monday night, while Mr. Hutchinson, the longest of long shots for the nomination, has given a flurry of interviews.“The Republican Party should not dismiss this case out of hand,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. “These are serious allegations that a grand jury has found probable cause on.”On Sunday morning, Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr, weighed in on Fox News Sunday, saying he was “shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were.” “If even half of it is true, he’s toast,” Mr. Barr said. “It is a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of a witch hunt — is ridiculous.”The critics of Mr. Trump also have an appeal that goes to the center of the party’s identity: law and order. Republicans are still attacking Democrats on the rise of street crime after the pandemic even as they attack the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the special prosecutor and the federal grand jury system.“If Congress has the ability to have oversight over the Department of Justice, I encouraged them to do it vigorously and fairly and ask all the questions they need,” Mr. Christie said on CNN. “But what we should also be doing is holding to account people who are in positions of responsibility and saying, if you act badly, there has to be penalties for that. There has to be a cost to be paid.”But voters eager to believe the dark tales spun by Mr. Trump of a nefarious “deep state,” of “Communists” bent on the destruction of America, are receiving encouragement from candidates who are ostensibly Mr. Trump’s rivals. For them, the calculation appears to be capturing the former president’s voters if his legal troubles finally end his political career.“I am personally deeply skeptical of everything in that indictment,” Mr. Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur and author, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, adding, “I personally have no faith whatsoever in those vague allegations.”Other candidates were less blunt but equally willing to challenge the integrity of the justice system, a system, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said, “where the scales are weighted” against conservatives.The language of Trump supporters after his indictment last Thursday has alarmed some experts.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesIn truth, the conservative world is divided. Some figures have, predictably, rallied around Mr. Trump with irresponsible rhetoric that appeared to call for violence.“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and 75 million Americans just like me. And most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.,” said Kari Lake, the failed candidate for governor of Arizona.More surprisingly were the voices on the Trumpist right who have voiced their concerns — over the charges and over their impact on the Republican Party’s future. When Charlie Kirk of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA called for every other Republican candidate for the presidency to drop out of the race in solidarity with Mr. Trump, Ann Coulter, the right-wing bomb thrower, responded, “That’s nothing! I’m calling on EVERY REPUBLICAN TO COMMIT SUICIDE in solidarity with Trump!” — acknowledging that rallying around the former president could send the party to oblivion.Mike Cernovich, a lawyer and provocateur on the right, criticized the indictment as a “selective prosecution,” but also said, “Trump walked into this trap.”How the party, and its 2024 candidates, respond will matter, to the country and to the party’s political fortunes. The core Republican voter might stand with Mr. Trump, but most Americans most likely will not. It is a dilemma, acknowledged Clifford Young, president of U.S. public affairs at the polling and marketing firm Ipsos.“For the average American in the middle, they’re appalled,” he said, “but for the base, not only is support being solidified, they don’t believe what is happening.” “Heck,” he added, “they believe he won the election.” More

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      Who’s Running in the Republican Presidential Primary?

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      Whenever I want to put myself to sleep at night, I run through the names of all the former vice presidents. OK, sorta peculiar. It might be time for a break. Maybe I’ll just try making a list of Republican candidates for president.Back when Donald Trump announced it all seemed sorta life-as-usual, but now the race is definitely on. There are currently somewhere between 12 and 400 Republicans eyeing the White House.All the major names are men except Nikki Haley, who’s arguing that “it’s time to put a badass woman in the White House.” Well, yeah. There’s very little chance Haley’s campaign is going anywhere, but I think we can all agree she could really perk things up.We’re also expecting some energy from the newly announced candidate Chris Christie. Rather than dodging the whole Donald Trump matter whenever possible, Christie stresses that he’s running to save the country from a former close colleague who he now calls a “lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog.”And that’s just the beginning! On Wednesday we acquired Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. His great claim to fame is having built a software company that he sold for over $1 billion. Warning: Do not call Burgum a billionaire. (“Not even close!”) He’s really not into that. You’ll hurt his feelings.Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t have that problem since he’s reportedly worth only $600 million or so (biopharmaceuticals). Still, he’s invested at least $10 million in the race so far and it’s gotten … well, hey, we’re talking about him.Ramaswamy, who’s 37, went to Harvard around the same time as Pete Buttigieg and has claimed that Buttigieg is “like the Diet Coke to my Coca-Cola.” Where do you think he came up with that one? Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.OK, and let’s see … there’s Perry Johnson. Ever heard of Perry Johnson? He did run for governor of Michigan last year but got thrown off the Republican primary ballot for invalid petition signatures. Which must have been a little embarrassing for someone who made his fortune building a firm that promises to help your company meet business quality standards.Johnson used a pinch of his money running an ad during the Super Bowl celebrating, um, himself. (“Perry Johnson: Quality guru. Governor for a perfect Michigan.”) Fans who lost interest in the game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals were free to contemplate the suggestion that they give thanks to Johnson “when your car door closes just right.”Didn’t work. But they do say he’s a really great bridge player. Just remember him that way. Perry Johnson … I bid two no-trump.You don’t need any previous government experience in your bio to be on the campaign trail. Ryan Binkley of Texas is out meeting and greeting in Iowa, and he’s never done anything remotely like this before. Although he claims he started thinking about running for president around eight years ago. So it’s not like he hasn’t been mulling.Binkley bills himself as a pastor and — wait for the shock — super fiscal conservative. He’s also the chief executive and co-founder of Generational Group, an investment banking firm that specializes in mergers and acquisitions.Are you picking up on a theme here, people? We have a very crowded field of superrich candidates. (Don’t call them billionaires!) And while sitting on piles of cash will not necessarily make you president, it sure does help open a lot of doors.There actually are some candidates who don’t seem to have a ton of money. We haven’t gotten to Larry Elder, a California talk radio host who did very well against other Republicans in the Gov. Gavin Newsom recall election. Which was certainly a great triumph for Elder except for the part about Newsom beating the entire recall idea back by huge margins.Or Asa Hutchinson, the 72-year-old former governor of Arkansas. OK, not necessarily a new broom. But you will so impress your friends when you say, “… And let’s not forget about Asa Hutchinson.”I guess Senator Tim Scott really ought to be up higher. He is the best known Black candidate in the field so far and he is having adventures. Got into a fight on TV over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, much to the audience’s irritation. (“Do not boo. This is ‘The View,’” urged Whoopi Goldberg.)Mike Pence is a sorta interesting challenge. You will remember that when Trump lost the 2020 election, Pence had an allegedly ceremonial role certifying the results. Which he did, guaranteeing a normal transfer of power and getting to hear the Jan. 6 crowd of rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”Should we be grateful? I mean, yeah, sure, when it comes to writing his obituary. But do you want to root for Pence this time around? He’s extremely conservative, especially on social matters. (“Well, I think defending the unborn first and foremost is more important than politics. I really believe it’s the calling of our time.”)Sigh. Will the Republican field get any bigger? Or is it going the other way? I was watching one of the TV news channels the other day and suddenly a headline flashed:“Breaking News: Sununu Passes on Presidential Campaign.”Yes — shocker of the week! — the governor of New Hampshire has decided he’s not going to try for the nomination. Possibly the highest-ranking Republican in the country who definitely doesn’t want to give it a shot.Guess you’ll all have to stop saying, “Yeah, but wait until Chris Sununu gets in there.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy’s Long Shot Run at the Republican Nomination

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      GOOSE LAKE, Iowa — “We’re like a bunch of blind bats. We human beings are, we millennials are, we Americans are,” Vivek Ramaswamy riffed. “We can’t see where we are.”Bats send sonar signals, which bounce off objects and allow the mammal to navigate. “So we do that, we send out our signals, and it bounces off something that is true, something that is real, like family. The two parents who brought me into this world, my mother and father. The two children who I brought into this world,” he went on. “That is real. That is true. That means something to me.”In person, Mr. Ramaswamy’s presentation is a lot more intense; it is also about a bleaker landscape of American life than the bright version of Trumpism he’s trying to project.“We’re hungry for a cause,” he said of millennials when he spoke on a recent Friday night in Iowa, in a navy suit and white dress shirt, not pausing too often for applause and walking the stage. “We’re hungry for purpose and meaning. And identity. At a point in our national history when the things that used to fill that void — things like faith, patriotism, hard work, family — these things have disappeared.” Instead, he said, “poison” and “secular cults” had taken their place.All of this — the bats and the void and the disappearance of our families from the collective American identity — was delivered to a county committee dinner in a friendly ballroom with an open bar, a buffet, patriotic decorations and a fun local musician playing country hits from the past.This is what a pro-capitalism candidate looks like in post-Trump Republican politics, in which the emphasis is on the creation of a national identity in the face of spiritual emptiness and the idea that big business and the customer aren’t always right.The next morning, at campaign events held at one of those cool digital driving ranges and at a pizza place with a beautiful old tin ceiling, the American identity crisis talk continued. “There’s more to life than just the aimless passage of time, going through the motions,” he said standing in front of what looked like a floor-to-ceiling image of a Pebble Beach fairway. “You’re more than the genetic attributes you inherited on the day you were born,” he went on to say. “You are you.”He is technically the business candidate, but not really. This is the elite corporate executive as culture warrior. Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch in Iowa was not about the application of free-market principles to the federal government, at least not in the way you might expect from a pre-Trump Republican business candidate. Nor was it economic populism, either, not really, because his idea isn’t so much that corporations are ripping you off; it’s that they’re in bad-faith league with one another to advance liberal pieties.Thalassa Raasch for The New York TimesThalassa Raasch for The New York TimesThalassa Raasch for The New York TimesThalassa Raasch for The New York TimesTheoretically, he could be doing a business pitch. Mr. Ramaswamy started a pharmaceutical investment and drug development company that picked up pharmaceutical projects abandoned by other companies and aimed to bring the drugs to market. In 2020, as C.E.O., he refused to support Black Lives Matter and in 2021 was an author of a Wall Street Journal opinion essay arguing that online platforms were censoring people when they blocked accounts in the chaotic aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021. He has published three books critiquing the environmental, social and governance practices of BlackRock and other fund managers and started an anti-E.S.G. asset management firm.As Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review pointed out, Mr. Ramaswamy has chosen to “download and internalize” MAGA moods — shutting down the F.B.I., replacing the A.T.F., raising the voting age to 25 unless you pass a civics test or serve in the military or as an emergency worker. These are the kind of proposals that are drafted to please and anger the right people and never happen. He’s given $10,000 to the defense fund of Daniel Penny, the man accused of second-degree manslaughter in the subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, and his campaign is selling a coffee mug that reads “truth,” with the words “wokeism,” “climatism” and “transgenderism” crossed out above. He has repeatedly portrayed trans people as mentally ill.As a Ramaswamy campaign memo recently said, “The mistake every other campaign is making is that they see their path to the nomination through Trump, when our path is alongside Trump.” In reality, many Republican politicians have seen their path alongside Mr. Trump as they wait for someone else to break him like a big piñata.Mr. Ramaswamy wants to restore an American identity that, in speeches, involves a lot of concepts but rarely anecdotes. That identity would involve the pursuit of excellence, which he described in an interview along vague, traditional lines — people achieving their maximal potential, free of societal hindrance. He contended this ethic is absent from corporate life. “I think that part of this is psychological, that in the moment people feel compelled to apologize for excellence,” he told me. To “be accepted as cool,” the most successful “have to apologize for the system that got them there by sticking the word ‘stakeholder’ in front of it,” he said, and called “the racial equity agenda” an “example of prioritizing a different value.”Mr. Ramaswamy came up in an elite world where some people employ the idea of charity or progressive impulses to get ahead, first in admissions, then in business, and they sometimes become deluded or self-interested ethical consumers. “Whatever justice is, surely it can’t be attained so incidentally, by just picking the right shirts, the right burgers and the right bankers,” he writes in the book “Woke, Inc.” He’s bothered by that thing many also dislike, which is a hedge fund putting in place a superficial diversity effort intended to disrupt as little as possible to prevent a lawsuit or make money, or a corporation with an aspirational brand made of cotton produced in the Xinjiang region of China.This is the world summarized by Sam Bankman-Fried last year in a DM he later claimed he thought was off the record: “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”In “Woke, Inc.,” Mr. Ramaswamy’s solution is to separate politics and business. He argues that both stakeholder capitalists and Milton Friedman devotees miss something in the corporate system we have: A sole focus on fiduciary duty and profit maximization keeps corporations from becoming extragovernmental bodies like Dutch colonial trading companies.But it’s also not as if the only time anyone cares about racism in America is to sell Pepsi or to get into Columbia. The practical implications of keeping business and politics separate become complicated quickly for this reason; the economy is made up of millions of individuals who live in the larger world. “This is a business,” as Dolly Parton said of her decision to remove “Dixie,” the nickname for the South often associated with the Confederacy, from the Stampede, two dinner show attractions she owns. She didn’t want to offend prospective customers. What if Chick-fil-A wants to stay closed on Sundays? What if a company wants to market fratty beer to trans people and supporters as customers in and of themselves? What counts as maximizing profit or respecting the employees, and what counts as politics? What is politics?Over the past decade, many presidential candidates — especially the long-shot, unconventional kind in both parties — have talked in secular-spiritual ways about voids in American life and the corruption among elites. There are different theories of the case (technological change, inequality, institutional decline, loneliness), including the omnipresence of corporations and the emptiness of material goods for justice. The vision that markets and capitalism would liberalize the world and accelerate the realization of a pluralistic America, full of choice and privacy and respect, has begun to dim.Mr. Ramaswamy has isolated a problem in that vision (the hollowness of so much of corporate social policy). His national-identity-based explanation for the void is winning with some post-Trump conservative politicians who see the “power, dominion, control and punishment” that Mr. Ramaswamy said he believes are behind climate activism in much of American elite life. It’s a lean time for the sunnier version of a capitalist pitch — in which climate change is a problem but also a business opportunity, just like the valued employees and customers in a pluralistic, ever-changing American society.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The G.O.P. Primary: ‘City on a Hill’ or ‘American Carnage’?

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIt’s 77 weeks before Election Day and over half a dozen people have already thrown their hats into the G.O.P race. On our new podcast, “Matter of Opinion,” Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen take a tour of the 2024 Republican primary field to understand what it takes to survive in the present-day Republican ecosystem — and maybe even beat the Trump in the room.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Photograph by Scott Olson/GettyThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (212) 556-7440. We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.Follow our hosts on Twitter: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen).“Matter of Opinion” was produced this week by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Pat McCusker, Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, the Wealthy Republican Who Thinks Trump Didn’t Go Far Enough

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican wunderkind running for his party’s presidential nomination, would like potential supporters to know he believes in the rule of law and the Constitution’s separation of powers — though his applications of such principles can seem selective.After intense study of the Constitution, Mr. Ramaswamy says he believes that the awesome powers of the presidency would allow him to abolish the Education Department “on Day 1,” part of an assault on the “administrative state” that his 2024 rival, Donald J. Trump, fell short on during Days 1 through 1,461 of his presidency. Never mind that the Constitution confers the power of the purse on Congress, and a subsequent law makes it illegal for the president not to spend that money.Mr. Ramaswamy also wants to eradicate teachers’ unions, though he concedes that they are governed by contracts with state and local governments.And he says he would unleash the military to stamp out the scourge of fentanyl coming across the Southern border, unworried by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the military for civil law enforcement.In short, Mr. Ramaswamy, a lavishly wealthy 37-year-old entrepreneur and author pitching himself as a new face of intellectual conservatism, is promising to go farther down the road of ruling by fiat than Mr. Trump would or could.Mr. Ramaswamy has already lent his well-appointed campaign more than $10 million, and he has said he will spend over $100 million if necessary. John Tully for The New York Times“I respect what Donald Trump did, I do, with the America First agenda, but I think he went as far as he was going to go,” Mr. Ramaswamy told a crowd of about 100 on Tuesday night at Murphy’s Tap Room in Bedford, N.H. “I’m in this race to take the America First agenda far further than Donald Trump ever did.”Mr. Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati-born son of Indian immigrants, would seem to be the longest of long shots: He has never held elective office and has vanishingly low name recognition. But he is playing to sizable crowds and exudes a confidence that can be infectious. He has already lent his well-appointed campaign more than $10 million and has said he will spend over $100 million if necessary. Recent polling, both nationally and in New Hampshire, shows him on the rise in the Republican field, though at no more than 5 percent.His overt shots at Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom he labels a visionless “implementer” without the courage to venture into the hostile territories of college campuses or NBC News, are intended to clear what he sees as an eventual showdown with Mr. Trump. His brashest criticism of the former president is over Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he might skip primary debates, depriving Mr. Ramaswamy of the stage he says he needs to catch his rival.Mr. Ramaswamy sees a simple path to the White House: score respectably in the Iowa caucuses, win New Hampshire, vault to the nomination — and then triumph in a landslide that would exceed Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980.“Even as a freshman, he had a similar voice, confident, articulate, very sure of himself,” said Anson Frericks, a high school friend of Mr. Ramaswamy’s and a business partner at the asset management firm they founded to give investors financial options untethered to socially conscious corporations. “Confidence builds with success. It’s a virtuous cycle.”And though his promises may be legally problematic, they sound correct to many Republicans — or at least authoritative. Mr. Ramaswamy at Linda’s Breakfast Place in Seabrook, N.H., on Thursday. Recent polling, both nationally and in New Hampshire, shows him on the rise in the Republican field, though at no more than 5 percent.John Tully for The New York Times“He seems like he knows what he’s talking about,” said Bob Willis, a self-described “Ultra-MAGA Trump person” who was waiting for Mr. Ramaswamy to arrive on Wednesday in Keene, N.H.Confidence is Mr. Ramaswamy’s gift. His father, an engineer and a patent lawyer at General Electric, is, the candidate says, far more liberal than his son. His mother is a physician. He attributes his strict vegetarianism to his Indian roots. A piano teacher began Mr. Ramaswamy’s political journey with long asides on the evils of government and the wrongs of Hillary Clinton. At Harvard, he majored in biology and developed a brash libertarianism complete with a political rapper alter ego, “Da Vek.”Between graduation and Yale Law School, he worked in finance, investing in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Before getting his law degree, he was already worth around $15 million, he said in an interview, during which he worried about wealth inequality.“I think it fuels a social hierarchy in our country that rejects the premise that we’re all coequal citizens,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati-born son of Indian immigrants, has never held elective office and has low name recognition.John Tully for The New York TimesIndeed, Mr. Ramaswamy’s promises have an overarching theme that the nation — especially his generation and younger — has lost its spiritual center, creating what the mathematician Blaise Pascal called “a God-shaped vacuum in the heart.” That hole is being filled, Mr. Ramaswamy says, by “secular cults” — racial “wokeism,” sexual and gender fluidity, and the “climate cult” — which can be “diluted to oblivion” only with the rediscovery of the American ideals of patriotism, meritocracy and sacrifice. Mr. Ramaswamy can say things that stretch credulity or undermine his seriousness. He boasts on the campaign trail of his recent star turn jousting with Don Lemon just before Mr. Lemon was fired by CNN. But his statement in that exchange that Black Americans did not secure their civil rights until they secured their right to bear arms made little historical sense, since the civil rights movement was predicated on nonviolence. Indeed, the arming of the Black Panthers led to a deadly government crackdown.Mr. Ramaswamy accepts the established science that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but his answer is to “drill, frack, burn coal” and use more fossil fuels. That will supposedly unleash economic growth that will pay for mitigation efforts to shield everyone from climate change.He also says he is the first presidential candidate to promise to end race-based affirmative action, ignoring that this was the centerpiece of Ben Carson’s presidential run in 2016. Mr. Ramaswamy would end affirmative action by executive order, he says.He would not spend another dollar on aid to Ukraine but would use military force to “annihilate” Mexican drug cartels.Gregg Dumont, wearing a T-shirt picturing Mr. Trump in jail as a political prisoner, said Mr. Ramaswamy had his vote over the man on his shirt. John Tully for The New York TimesOn Wednesday night in Windham, N.H., Mr. Ramaswamy suggested he would name Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democratic vaccine skeptic challenging President Biden, as his running mate. On Tuesday in Bedford, he was asked by a woman with a Black son-in-law and a mixed-race grandson to clarify the meaning of “anti-woke.”Mr. Ramaswamy — the author of “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam” — answered, “I’ve never used that word to actually describe myself,” as aides handed out stickers reading: “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek.”All of this can be somewhat mystifying to prominent people who worked with him. Mr. Ramaswamy’s real fortune comes from the pharmaceutical investment and drug development firm Roivant Sciences, founded after the entrepreneur had a “brilliant” idea, said Donald M. Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Barack Obama.Pharmaceutical giants often abandon research efforts after concluding that even if they are successful, the medicinal product might not be profitable. Roivant would then pick up such ventures and bring them to market. Roivant’s advisory board eventually included Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator and Senate majority leader; Dr. Berwick; and Kathleen Sebelius, a health and human services secretary in the Obama administration.Part of the appeal, Mr. Daschle said, was Mr. Ramaswamy’s commitment to bringing prescription drugs to market at affordable prices.“I just assumed that because he was so interested in doing as much as he was to lower costs, social responsibility and corporate responsibility was part of his thinking,” Mr. Daschle said.Then, after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Mr. Ramaswamy began publicly castigating corporations for speaking out on social issues like Black Lives Matter, voting rights and “E.S.G.” — environmental, social and governance investing. Opinion columns in The Wall Street Journal were followed by appearances on Tucker Carlson’s now-canceled Fox News show.“I was rather shocked,” said Dr. Berwick, who resigned from Roivant on Jan. 12, 2021. Within days, Mr. Daschle and Ms. Sebelius quit. Mr. Ramaswamy soon followed, to write three books, help start the asset management company with Mr. Frericks and run for president.Mr. Ramaswamy says he would not spend another dollar on aid to Ukraine but would use military force to “annihilate” Mexican drug cartels.John Tully for The New York TimesAt this very early stage of the campaign, Mr. Ramaswamy is open about the limits of his appeal. Evangelical Christians who dominate the Republican caucuses in Iowa will need to be brought along to his Hindu faith. His “war with Mexico” may go over well in South Carolina, but faces resistance among more libertarian voters in New Hampshire, he said.And New Hampshire cynics don’t quite know how seriously to take him. Victoria Gulla, 50, of Spofford, N.H., questioned whether he was part of a back-room deal with Mr. Trump to help take out Mr. DeSantis in exchange for a position in the next Trump administration, in the way she thinks Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, helped take down Senator Marco Rubio in New Hampshire in 2016.In a statement on Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump fueled that kind of speculation, saying he was “pleased to see that Vivek Ramaswamy is doing so well” in a recent poll and “seems to be on his way to catching Ron DeSanctimonious.”A hundred million dollars in self-funding could keep Mr. Ramaswamy in the race for a long time, and some voters were clearly persuaded by Mr. Ramaswamy’s nearly messianic appeal for a spiritual and social renewal.Gregg Dumont, 45, of Manchester, broke into tears in Windham as he praised the candidate for daring to save his children from moral decay and what he called the “racism” of identity politics.Mr. Dumont, wearing a T-shirt picturing Mr. Trump in jail as a political prisoner, said Mr. Ramaswamy had his vote over the man on his shirt: “All the policies with an upgrade, and none of the personality,” he said. “I’m sick of the narcissism.” More

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      5 Applause Lines from Vivek Ramaswamy’s Stump Speech

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      “End” this, “shut down” that, “annihilate” the other thing. A political newcomer promises to outdo Donald Trump.Vivek Ramaswamy, a 37-year-old entrepreneur and author running for president as a Republican, has never run for elective office before, but he has clearly picked up the art of the stump speech. Here are five of his most reliable applause lines over a few days on the trail in New Hampshire.“I will be the first presidential candidate to say I will end race-based affirmative action.”It is a questionable assertion, because Ben Carson made ending affirmative action central to his 2016 campaign. But to the overwhelmingly white audiences that Mr. Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, is addressing, the promise goes over well. It fits in with his broader criticism of group identity and of the praise for diversity that is fundamental to liberal politics. But his pledge to end racial preferences by executive order could be more complicated than he makes it sound.“I will shut down the fourth branch of government, the administrative state. You cannot tame that beast. You must end it.”Mr. Ramaswamy insists that he will go much further than former President Donald J. Trump did to “drain the swamp” of the “Deep State.” And he says he will do it unilaterally, ending Civil Service protections by executive order, imposing eight-year term limits on federal positions, shuttering the Education Department and replacing the F.B.I., the I.R.S., and other agencies. The notion that “those elected to government should actually run the government” is central to his campaign, which demonizes the unelected bureaucracy that he says runs Washington.“We will use our military to annihilate the Mexican drug cartels.”While in Keene, N.H., on Wednesday, Mr. Ramaswamy mused about using a local precision-weapons plant to elaborate on his threat of military action against organized crime across the southern border in Mexico. Never mind that such a strike would be against a U.S. ally and neighbor. Mr. Trump made similar threats but never carried them out. And Mr. Ramaswamy has conceded that among some libertarian-minded voters, the promise sounds disconcertingly bellicose.“How about a constitutional amendment to make the voting age 25, but you can still vote at 18 if you serve the country or pass the civics test my mother passed to become a citizen?”The proposal might not win the hearts of Generation Z, but it appeals to older Republican primary voters who believe the country has lost its sense of citizenship and purpose. It might also resonate with those who understand how lopsided the youth vote is in favor of Democrats.“Today we depend on our main enemy for our entire modern way of life. That is a problem. The Declaration of Independence that I will sign as your next president will be our Declaration of Independence from Communist China.”Mr. Ramaswamy says confronting China would be his top foreign policy priority, and it will entail short-term pain. He would prevent American businesses from expanding into Chinese markets unless “our demands are met” by Beijing. Those include more intellectual property protections and an end to required joint ventures with state-controlled businesses. Unwinding consumer dependence on China would be difficult and economically distressing, he concedes, but he said the endeavor would be the essence of citizen sacrifice and would forge national unity. More

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      Republican 2024 Hopefuls Gather in Iowa Without Trump and DeSantis

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      Republicans gathered in the state Saturday in a kickoff event that lacked the attendance of two front-runners, though their presence was felt.More than nine months before the Iowa caucuses, eight declared and potential presidential candidates came to a gathering of Christian conservatives on Saturday evening to test a question: Can flesh-and-blood politicians eyeing the highest office in the land be upstaged by a canned, prerecorded video?The answer was almost certainly yes.The audio did not quite match the video on former President Donald J. Trump’s recorded message to the hundreds gathered at the largest cattle call yet of the fledgling campaign season. The delivery of his trademark hyperbole was rushed to fit into the final, 10-minute window that closed the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kickoff.But the reception given to the man who wasn’t there was strikingly different from the applause given to those who were, and the candidates who bothered to make the trip barely bothered to try to knock the front-runner from his perch.Their strategy appeared straightforward: Avoid confrontation with the better known, better funded front-runners, hope Mr. Trump’s attacks take out — or at least take down — Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is second in most Republican polls, and hope outside forces, namely indictments, take out Mr. Trump.Then it’s anybody’s game.“I think it’s going to come down to me and Donald Trump very soon in this race,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author, said in an interview before delivering an address in which the former president’s name was not uttered. “I know that may sound odd to folks like you who are tracking the present, but if you’re going to see where the puck is going, there’s a hunger for an outsider.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author, did not mention former President Donald J. Trump during his address at the event.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressThe Iowa conservatives who attended the events on Saturday swore they were open to a Republican nominee not named Trump. They munched on Chick-fil-A sandwiches, listened attentively and were eager to talk politics eight years after the last real Republican presidential contest in Iowa.“I like to see them battle it out,” said Dan Applegate, a former co-chairman of the Dallas County, Iowa, G.O.P. “The good candidates are the ones who can make it through.”Former Vice President Mike Pence made an appearance, greeted like a celebrity by potential voters though his pitch for military aid to Ukraine garnered a tepid response. So was Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, and some others who were far below the radar, like the radio personality Larry Elder, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman-turned-conservative gadfly, and a businessman named Perry Johnson.Mr. Johnson, in fact, was the only speaker to challenge a front-runner by name when he concluded his remarks: “I just want to say, DeSantis is making a huge mistake by not coming here. And I don’t understand it, but each to his own.”Otherwise, the hopefuls just wanted to avoid the candidates who opted not to come in person.“It’s about being able to deliver a message that resonates and recognizing that we want a tomorrow that will be better than yesterday. We want a next year that needs to be better,” said Mr. Hurd, on his first trip ever to Iowa, “and I think anybody who taps into that, regardless of the competition, can be can be successful.”It is early in the race, extremely early. In April 2015, two months before Mr. Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy, those gathered at the same Faith and Freedom forum had no idea what was about to hit them. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida warned of the metastasizing threat of Islamic jihadists. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky fretted over Common Core, a long-forgotten concern about the nationalization of school curriculums.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas railed against a Supreme Court that was one vote away from ordering small businesses to serve gay couples, while Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, bragged that under his leadership, his state had ended abortions after 20 weeks, a threshold that would be considered the height of timidity in the post-Roe v. Wade G.O.P.Former Vice President Mike Pence was greeted as a celebrity by attendees at the event.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesOnce Mr. Trump entered, those issues would be swept away by his peculiar brand of personality politics and name calling.This time, the potential candidates know exactly what they are up against, but they just didn’t address it. Mr. Pence fretted over “radical gender ideology” and pupils penalized for improper pronouns. Mr. Scott, preaching his trademark optimism and unity, nonetheless warned that “the radical left, they are selling the drug of victimhood and the narcotic of despair.”In private, Mr. Ramaswamy suggested that true voters of faith could see through Mr. Trump’s assumed trappings of religiosity, and he castigated Mr. DeSantis for refusing to sit down with news outlets he deems ideologically hostile and to speak on college campuses. In public, he was far more oblique, declining to name names when he said that if a conservative could not bring himself to visit a college campus, he probably should not be sitting across a negotiating table with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.Mr. Trump could give the audience what it was looking for, hailing the overturning of Roe v. Wade — “nobody thought it was going to happen” — and the most anti-abortion presidency ever, while promising to “obliterate the deep state,” hunt down “the radical zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education.” He concluded, “The left-wing gender lunacy being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse, and it will stop immediately.”It went over well. Paul Thurmond, a 65-year-old from Des Moines, chatted amiably and shook hands with Mr. Pence as the former vice president made his way from table to table. But Mr. Thurmond, though he said he was open-minded, was clearly partial to Mr. Trump.“Right now, I think Pence is too nice a guy,” he said. “He won’t be able to contend with the evil that the Democrats will rain down on him.” More

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      Criss-Crossing the ’24 Campaign Trail, Before the Campaign Is Official

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      A handful of prominent Republicans, including Tim Scott and Ron DeSantis, have been testing the waters for months, mindful of the biggest fish out there: Donald Trump.Two months ago, Senator Tim Scott stood before cameras and reporters in South Carolina, leaning heavily on his biography and the Civil War history of his native Charleston for a soft launch of a presidential campaign.Fast-forward to Wednesday in Iowa, where Mr. Scott announced a presidential exploratory committee, and the soft launch remained just as soft.If his video announcement sounded familiar — with a remembrance of the battle of Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War, recollections from his rise from poverty and a denunciation of the politics of racial division — it should have. After two months, his campaign argument had not changed, nor had an actual campaign — he still is not a candidate.Mr. Scott’s reluctance to officially join the 2024 Republican field is shared by others who are wary of the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump. While Mr. Scott explores, Ron DeSantis delays, Mike Pence procrastinates and Mike Pompeo ponders, all hoping that forces beyond the voters will derail Mr. Trump’s third run for the White House without their having to engage in combat with the pugnacious ex-president.“They see the writing’s on the wall — Trump is going to win the primary,” said Al Baldasaro, a Republican former state lawmaker in New Hampshire and an outspoken Trump fan. “Maybe they’re hoping he’ll go to jail or get fined or something, but it’s not going to stop him.”The situation for Republicans has helped give rise to several unofficial White House runs that increasingly look and sound like official White House runs.Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Trump’s biggest rival, will be in New Hampshire on Thursday to meet the voters who will cast the first ballots in the Republican primaries next year — although still technically as governor of Florida, and not as a declared candidate for president.Mr. Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president, will swing by the National Rifle Association’s annual conference in Indianapolis at the end of the week before visiting a Republican National Committee donor conference in Nashville — still not as a candidate.Mr. Pompeo, the former secretary of state, has been making the rounds in early-voting states — just not as a candidate. And former Representative Mike Rogers was a long way from his native Michigan when he found himself chatting about current events last week in New Hampshire — as a very concerned citizen.Former Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to appear at a National Rifle Association event in Indianapolis.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe so-called shadow campaign ahead of the Republican primary contest is not all that unusual, but the odd minuet of 2023 has one unique characteristic — the noncandidates are not shadowboxing one another, but the first declared candidate, Mr. Trump..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“The new dynamic now compared to ’11 or even ’07 is that everyone recognizes that when you enter the ring you’re in the cross hairs of Donald Trump,” said Alice Stewart, an aide to Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign in 2012, who counseled potential candidates to line up their money, infrastructure and message before declaring their candidacies. “The safe space is to be in the early states but not necessarily in the race until you’re ready.”Mr. Trump’s decision to make his candidacy official and early — in November, just after the midterm elections — did not clear the field, as he might have hoped. His ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, formally announced her entry into the Republican race in February. Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author, jumped in a week later. Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas and a Trump critic, entered the fray this month.“I said all along it’s important for the Republican Party to have an alternative to Donald Trump,” Mr. Hutchinson said on Wednesday. “I don’t think it’s a time to hunker down for our party or our country. It’s a time to engage.”But Mr. Trump’s hold on the core Republican voter base and the Republican National Committee’s new winner-take-all primary rules have kept his most formidable rivals circling the runway, awaiting signals that the turbulence has cleared, said Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore’s presidential campaign manager in 2000.It was evident on Wednesday in Mr. Scott’s appearance on the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends,” when Mr. Scott, the only Black Republican senator, was pressed to explain how he would beat Mr. Trump to the nomination.“If we focus on our uniqueness, we focus on our path to where we are, I believe we give the voters a choice so that they can decide how we move forward,” he answered. “As opposed to trying to have a conversation about how to beat a Republican, I think we’re better off having a conversation about beating Joe Biden.”In the shadow campaign, meanwhile, the maneuvering goes on. Mr. DeSantis has one clear advantage: a national infrastructure, said Ron Kaufman, a longtime Republican presidential strategist and a confidant of Mitt Romney’s in 2012. Jeff Roe, a former aide to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has signed on with Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down PAC, where he can bring to bear the infrastructure of his multistate firm Axiom Strategies.But he still needs to declare.By historical standards, it is still early. The last competitive Republican presidential race came in 2016, and by this time there were two major candidates, Mr. Cruz and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, and Mr. Trump, the eventual nominee, did not declare until June 2015.The wide-open primary of 2012 included May 2011 announcements by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Herman Cain, a former pizza executive. But the eventual nominee, Mr. Romney, did not join the pack until June, and Rick Perry, who at the time was the governor of Texas, waited until that August.The difference this year is that the front-runner is setting the pace. More