Vivek Ramaswamy

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      Will the real Vivek Ramaswamy please stand up? – podcast

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      He’s an entrepreneur, a former libertarian, a lover of rap, and has been labelled ‘Trump 2.0’ by some. He’s also campaigning to be the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election. So why is he polling well despite angering many?
      Jonathan Freedland speaks to Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark about Ramaswamy’s credentials, his campaign style and his chances of winning

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      The Guardian view on politicians and pop: don’t maim that tune | Editorial

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      The scene is Des Moines, Iowa, earlier this month. Up on stage is a man running to be the Republican party’s next pick for US president. A song starts over the tannoy. It is one of the hopeful’s declared favourites. Pumping the air, he lifts the mic and begins rapping along: “You better lose yourself in the music / The moment, you own it, you better never let it go.”So goes one of the best-known songs of the 21st century – and one of the most bizarre moments so far in the Republican primaries. Why is Vivek Ramaswamy – with an estimated net worth somewhere north of $950m – karaoke-ing about life in a mobile home? What does a product of Yale and Harvard know about having to wear a sweater coated with vomit (“mom’s spaghetti”)?Such questions clearly troubled Lose Yourself’s author, Eminem, who last week fired off a lawyer’s letter demanding that the politician stop using any of his work. Just as the song foretold, Mr Ramaswamy only got one shot – sadly for him.Politicians have tangled with pop for decades – just think of Harold Wilson’s canny award of MBEs to the Fab Four – yet in recent years, real political contenders have had to pretend that they actually listen to the stuff. Picking her Desert Island Discs in 1978, Margaret Thatcher thought she would subsist on a diet of Beethoven and Dvořák. Three decades later, Gordon Brown was asked whether he liked Arctic Monkeys and tried a cheery bluff about how they’d “certainly wake you up in the morning”.As the then chancellor later admitted, he’d never heard the band, let alone sluiced cider down his jumper to I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor. But he was right to observe that, from Strictly to the Lionesses, “Unless you can offer a view on each and every issue of the day, you are immediately accused of indecisiveness.” As mass-membership parties have withered away, so modern politicians must show that they are one of us through a feigned enthusiasm for popular culture – even though it has nothing to do with their job.In a few weeks, Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem, turns 51. He ranks among the most talented performers in hip-hop, an art form that has marked its own 50th birthday this month. Both are a good sight older than 38-year-old Mr Ramaswamy, and are soaked into our daily lives to an extent that politicians can only dream of. Lose Yourself has soundtracked countless gym sessions, an advert for Chrysler and a campaign by Joe Biden. Its author may hate the politics of Donald Trump and his Republican acolytes, but artists can’t choose their fans.Yet it is odd to see a venture capitalist such as Mr Ramaswamy act the underdog; or to hear Old Etonian David Cameron proclaim his love for The Eton Rifles by the Jam. Part of how this era of supersized inequality persists is by the people at the top pretending they’re just like those at the bottom. Why, they even listen to the same music! The boss of Goldman Sachs is a DJ, and our very own prime minister enjoys rap. Although, being Rishi Sunak, he knows all the words to that 90s embarrassment Ice Ice Baby. Give us Eminem any day. More

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      Wednesday briefing: How ‘anti-woke’ tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy shook up the Republican race

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      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.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat else we’ve been reading
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      The front pages“Britain must take China’s human rights abuses seriously, say MPs” is our Guardian splash this morning. The Financial Times says “Goldman Sachs bought UK and US companies using Chinese state cash”. “Britain isn’t a Christian nation now, say clergy” is the main offering in the Times while the Daily Telegraph has “Khan faces revolt over Ulez”. “Flights hell families £1,000s out of pocket” – that’s the Daily Mirror on airport chaos. “Not a penny to compensate air chaos victims” says the Daily Mail. A comparatively moderate take in the i – “UK airlines accused of abandoning passengers” – while the Metro tots up an “£80 million bill for air IT fiasco”. Top story in the Daily Express today is “PM: our Brexit freedoms will ditch EU rule to build homes”.Today in FocusRats, fires and floods: why the UK parliament is falling downIt is the symbol of Britain’s democracy and it is falling into decay. The Palace of Westminster needs extensive – and expensive – repairs. But are MPs ready to do what it takes to save it?Cartoon of the day | Daniel ChristieThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badTakahē are a large flightless prehistoric bird that were formally declared extinct in 1898 after their already reduced population was devastated by the arrival of European settlers’ animals. Five decades later they were rediscovered and, because of conservation efforts, their numbers now stand at about 500, growing at roughly 8% a year. The efforts are part of a wider project in New Zealand to protect the country’s endangered birds.In another landmark moment for the takahē, last week 18 of the birds were released in the Lake Wakatipu Waimāori valley, an alpine area of New Zealand’s South Island. They are now free to roam on slopes for the first time in over a century. It is a particularly significant moment for the Ngāi Tahu, the tribe who faced a long legal battle for the birds’ return to lands they had fought to regain.Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
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      Eminem demands Vivek Ramaswamy cease using his music on campaign trail

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      The rapper Eminem has demanded that Vivek Ramaswamy cease using his music.In a letter reported by the Daily Mail, a representative for the rapper’s publisher told counsel for the Republican presidential hopeful that Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers III, objected to Ramaswamy’s use of his compositions and was revoking a license to use them.The letter, dated 23 August, became public weeks after Ramaswamy, 38, a financial investor and politics newcomer, mounted an impromptu performance of Lose Yourself by Eminem at the Iowa State Fair, bemusing many Republicans but securing a measure of internet renown.Ramaswamy also grabbed the spotlight last Wednesday, at the first Republican debate in Wisconsin. His angry and blustering performance, including clashes with other candidates and a claim that “the climate change agenda is a hoax”, harvested significant media coverage.The Guardian has reported on how Ramaswamy’s claims to be a political outsider stand in contrast to deep links to rightwing donors and influencers, including Peter Thiel and Leonard Leo.Ramaswamy’s love for rap, and for Eminem in particular, has been widely reported. When he was a Harvard undergraduate, the future biotech entrepreneur rapped under the name “Da Vek”. He also told the Crimson, the Harvard campus newspaper, Lose Yourself by Eminem was his personal theme.“I consider myself a contrarian,” Ramaswamy said then. “I like to argue.”In its letter to the Ramaswamy campaign, Broadcast Music, Inc (BMI) said it “will consider any performance of the Eminem works by the Vivek 2024 campaign from this date forward to be a material breach of the agreement for which BMI reserves all rights and remedies”.In a statement to the Mail, a spokesperson for Ramaswamy referred to another Eminem song: “Vivek just got on the stage and cut loose. To the American people’s chagrin, we will have to leave the rapping to The Real Slim Shady.” More

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      Three-quarters of Americans say Biden too old for second term, poll finds

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      More than three-quarters of respondents in a new US poll said Joe Biden would be too old to be effective if re-elected president next year.But as many people in the survey said the 80-year-old Biden was “old” and “confused”, so a similar number saw his 77-year-old likely challenger, Donald Trump, as “corrupt” and “dishonest”.The poll from the Associated Press and Norc Center for Public Affairs said 77% of Americans – 89% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats – thought age would be a problem if Biden won the White House again. Significantly fewer said Trump’s age would be a problem: 51%, with only 29% of Republicans concerned.Trump skipped the first Republican debate last week. On Monday another national survey showed his whopping primary lead slipping only slightly thereafter.Emerson College Polling showed Trump at 50% support, a six-point drop from a pre-debate poll. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor widely held not to have performed strongly in Milwaukee, was second with a two-point bump to 12%.The investor Vivek Ramaswamy, who barged into the spotlight with an angry debate display, dropped one point to 9%. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador who confronted Ramaswamy, climbed five to 7%.Trump faces 14 more criminal charges than he has years on the calendar, but those 91 counts under four indictments, and other legal problems including being adjudicated a rapist, have not dented his popularity with Republicans or opened him to significant attacks from his main rivals.Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, did note an apparent “softening of support for Trump since last week’s survey, where 82% of Trump voters said they would definitely support him, compared to 71% after the debate”. But on that score there was also worrying news for DeSantis, whose support “softened from 32% who would definitely support to 25%”.Biden won a US Senate seat in 1972, ran for president in 1988 and 2008, and is already the oldest president ever elected. If re-elected, he would be 86 by the end of his second term.Haley has repeatedly said Biden will probably die in office, claiming to warn voters of the dangers of Kamala Harris, the vice-president, rising to power herself.The AP/Norc poll said: “When asked about the first word that comes to mind when they think of each candidate, 26% of all adults cited Biden’s age and 15% mentioned words associated with being slow and confused, while only 1% and 3% did so for Trump.”There was a less welcome sign for Republicans, particularly those threatening to impeach Biden over alleged corruption involving his son Hunter.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“For Trump, nearly a quarter mentioned words associated with corruption, crime, lying, or untrustworthiness, while only 8% mentioned those traits for Biden.”Two-thirds of respondents supported age limits for presidents, members of Congress and supreme court justices.On Sunday, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was asked about Biden’s age.“When people look at a candidate, whether he’s Joe Biden, or Trump, or Bernie Sanders, anybody else, they have to evaluate a whole lot of factors,” the 81-year-old told NBC, adding that when he met Biden recently, “he seemed fine to me”.“But I think at the end of the day, what we have to ask ourselves is, ‘What do people stand for?’ Do you believe that women have a right to control their own bodies? Well, the president has been strong on that.” More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants Elon Musk to be his presidential adviser

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      The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has said that he wants Elon Musk as an adviser if he becomes president.The billionaire biotech entrepreneur was in Newton, Iowa, campaigning at a town hall on Friday when he was asked about whom he would want as advisers for his potential presidency.Ramaswamy said in response that he wanted people with a “blank fresh impression” who do not “come from within” the government.“I’ve enjoyed getting to know better, Elon Musk recently, I expect him to be an interesting adviser of mine because he laid off 75% of the employees at Twitter,” NBC reports. “And then the effectiveness actually went up.”In an earlier interview this month with Fox News, Ramaswamy said of the layoffs: “What [Musk] did at Twitter is a good example of what I want to do with the administrative state … Take out the 75% of the dead weight cost, improve the actual experience of what it’s supposed to do.”Ramaswamy’s response on Friday also doubles down on comments he made in February: “Just as @elonmusk did at Twitter, as president I will release the ‘state action files’ from the federal government – exposing every instance where the feds pressured companies to take constitutionally prohibited actions. Roll that log over & see what crawls out. Won’t be pretty.”Since Ramaswamy joined the campaign trail, he has attracted the attention and praise from Musk, who earlier this month said: “He is a very promising candidate.”In response to another tweet in which Ramaswamy repeated his campaign values including “God is real,” “There are two genders,” “Human flourishing requires fossil fuels,” and “Reverse racism is racism,” Musk wrote: “He states his beliefs clearly.”Despite Ramaswamy positioning himself as an “outsider” and accusing his opponents of being “bought and paid for” by various GOP donors, a recent Guardian investigation found that Ramaswamy has deep ties to influential figures on both ends of the political spectrum including Peter Thiel, a rightwing donor and co-founder of PayPal.Ramaswamy’s other ties include Leonard Leo, a prominent rightwing activist currently under investigation in Washington DC over his efforts to install judges on federal courts including the supreme court.Other investigations by ProPublica and Documented have reported that Ramaswamy has delivered speeches at events staged by Teneo, a group chaired by Leo that seeks to “crush liberal dominance” in American life.Earlier this week, Ramaswamy’s campaign told the Associated Press that he had raised $450,000 in the first hours following the GOP primary debate on Wednesday night. More

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      ‘He’s an insider’: Ramaswamy’s deep ties to rightwing kingpins revealed

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      Vivek Ramaswamy has described himself as an “outsider”, accusing rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of being “bought and paid for” by donors and special interests.But the 38-year-old Ohio-based venture capitalist, whose sharp-elbowed and angry display stood out in the first Republican debate this week, has his own close ties to influential figures from both sides of the political aisle.Prominent among such connections are Peter Thiel, the co-founder of tech giants PayPal and Palantir and a rightwing mega-donor, and Leonard Leo, the activist who has marshaled unprecedented sums in his push to stock federal courts with conservative judges.Ramaswamy is a Yale Law School friend of JD Vance, the author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy who enjoyed success in finance before entering politics. At Yale, Vance and Ramaswamy attended what the New Yorker called an “intimate lunch seminar for select students” that was hosted by Thiel. Last year, backed by Thiel and espousing hard-right Trumpist views, Vance won a US Senate seat in Ohio.Thiel has since said he has stepped back from political donations. But he has backed Ramaswamy’s business career, supporting what the New Yorker called “a venture helping senior citizens access Medicare” and, last year, backing Strive Asset Management, a fund launched by Ramaswamy to attack environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies among corporate investors. Vance was also a backer.Ramaswamy’s primary vehicle to success has been Roivant, an investment company focused on the pharmaceuticals industry founded in 2014.The Roivant advisory board includes figures from both the Republican and Democratic establishments: Kathleen Sebelius, US health secretary under Barack Obama; Tom Daschle of South Dakota, formerly Democratic leader in the US Senate; and Olympia Snowe, formerly a Republican senator from Maine.Ramaswamy’s links to Leo – recently the recipient of a $1.6bn donation from the industrialist Barre Seid, believed to be the biggest ever such gift, but now reportedly the subject an investigation by the attorney general of Washington DC – are many.As reported by ProPublica and Documented, Ramaswamy has spoken at retreats staged by Teneo, a group Leo chairs and which aims to connect high-powered conservatives, to “crush liberal dominance” in American life.Other Teneo speakers have reportedly included Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor polling ahead of Ramaswamy in the Republican primary, and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who trails Ramaswamy and clashed with him on stage in Milwaukee.ProPublica also linked Thiel to the genesis of the Teneo group. According to a document seen by the Guardian, Ramaswamy became a Teneo member in 2021.Elsewhere, Ramaswamy is a board member of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a group with ties to Leo, and a member of the Federalist Society, the Leo-driven group which works to stock the courts with conservatives.Ramaswamy has also spoken to and received an award from the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a group of Republican state treasurers.In June, in South Carolina, the Post and Courier newspaper reported that last year, before launching his presidential bid, Ramaswamy attempted “to leverage his [Republican] connections to gain access [for Strive] to lucrative contracts to manage pension funds … [with] total assets of $39.6bn”.Similar pushes were mounted in Missouri and Indiana, the paper said. Curtis Loftis, the South Carolina state treasurer, told the Post and Courier there was “nothing improper” about such approaches.Asked about Ramaswamy’s claims to be an outsider in light of his links to rightwing donors, activists and establishment figures, a campaign spokesperson told the Guardian: “Vivek has lived the American dream and has had tremendous success in business.“There’s a colossal difference between someone who has friendships and business relationships with wealthy individuals and politicians who change their policies and positions to please their Super Pac donors,” they added.In the Wisconsin debate, Ramaswamy flourished in the absence of Donald Trump, the former US president who faces 91 criminal charges but nonetheless leads Republican polling by huge margins.Amid speculation that Ramaswamy might end up Trump’s running mate, Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, called Ramaswamy “a classic 2020s America tech bro bullshit artist … Trump for the 21st century”.Ramaswamy’s claim to be an outsider, Galen said, was part of his “fundamental understanding … that Maga [the pro-Trump Republican base] wants him to show that the rest of these people [in the primary] are politicians. He’s willing to be the showman … the outsider. Anti-establishment. ‘If anything is there, I dislike it because it’s there.’ You know, ‘I’m going to have fun with this. I’m not going to take it seriously because you’re a bunch of hacks and goons.’”But in another sense, regarding Ramaswamy’s ties to the likes of Leo and Thiel, Galen said: “I think that he’s an insider.“He walks into a room with Leonard Leo and says, ‘What do you need me to do?’ … And they’re like, ‘Here’s what we want you to do. Here’s what we need you to do.’ Right?“Do I think [Ramaswamy] cares about [issues like restricting] abortion? No, not particularly. I don’t think he has a firmly held belief on it. But if he thinks that it will help him, and in exchange for that Leonard Leo will throw a little chicken feed of the $1.6bn that old man gave him, to help him? Sure, what the hell?“He didn’t ever think he’d get this far. So now he’s just gonna push it as far as he can.”Ramaswamy, Galen said, was closely tied to a world of donors and non-profits in which Leo is “certainly at the center. And this movement only moves in one direction, and it’s toward the darkness. It’s towards authoritarianism. And it’s because it finds people like Ramaswamy. And the more that all these other candidates will now attack him, they will drive him further and further into the arms of those people.” More