Vivek Ramaswamy Goes Nuclear on CNN While Dropping Out of Debate He Didn’t Even Qualify For
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy raged at CNN on Tuesday morning and said “forget” the upcoming debate being held by the network – a debate Ramaswamy does not appear to have qualified for regardless.
CNN announced its Jan. 10 debate in mid-December and set the criteria to qualify for the event as surpassing “at least 10 percent in three separate national and/or Iowa polls of Republican caucusgoers or primary voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting, according to the network.”
“One of the three polls must be an approved CNN poll of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers. The qualifying window for the debate closes on January 2,” noted CNN at the time. RealClearPolitics currently has Ramaswamy sitting at 4.2 percent nationally and 5.9 percent in Iowa. Among the dozens of polls taken since April in the RealClearPolitics average of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers, Ramaswamy has never surpassed the 10 percent threshold.
Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who both appear to have qualified for the debate, have said they will attend. CNN announced later on Tuesday that Haley, DeSantis, and former President Donald Trump were the only GOP candidates to meet the criteria to participate — Ramaswamy fell short.
Trump announced on Tuesday he would skip the CNN debate for a Fox News town hall.
“Forget @CNN’s fake Iowa “debate” on Jan 10 which will be the most boring in modern history. We’re doing a live-audience show that night in Des Moines with @Timcast instead. Won’t hold back. Here’s the backstory on CNN’s shenanigans,” Ramaswamy wrote on X/Twitter, adding:
– On Dec 13, CNN disgracefully cut short its own Iowa town hall with me after I correctly pointed out uncomfortable truths about Jan 6, which CNN instantly dismissed as “conspiracy theories.”
– On Dec 14, CNN then threatened my campaign on the phone with a cease-and-desist & had YouTube black out the town hall after it got 200k+ views on YouTube in a matter of hours. Yet Nikki Haley’s CNN town hall was still up after 6 months (68k total views, sad).
– Later on Dec 14, CNN notified my campaign that multiple qualifying polls, which the RNC used for each of the RNC Debates, mysteriously wouldn’t count for CNN’s fake “debate” in Iowa on January 10.
– CNN Senior Media “Reporter” Oliver Darcy wrote a newsletter that castigated his own network for “allowing [me] to infect the public with his conspiracy campaign.
– CNN Commentator Van Jones said he was “literally shaking” when he heard me speak. And my rhetoric is “one step away from Nazi propaganda.”
-CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper said I delivered a “soliloquy of conspiracy theories.”
-CNN Anchor Pamela Brown and “Chief Investigative Correspondent” said Vivek has a “history of peddling disinformation.”
-CNN Anchor Kaitlan Collins said I use a “reasonable tone” to sell sinister lies to people “who aren’t paying close attention” and might think what he is saying “maybe is legitimate.”
-CNN’s token “conservative” Commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin said my rhetoric is “damaging to the country.”
Ramaswamy has received heavy criticism on various networks throughout the campaign as he repeatedly claimed on air that he did not say controversial quotes – despite recordings of those quotes. Ramaswamy denied to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins he had questioned the events of 9/11 and suggested the government may have somehow been involved in an interview with the Atlantic – later calling the anchor a “petulant teenager” for fact-checking him.
Fox News even came to Collins’s defense, with Bret Baier noting, “I think in some of these interviews he got caught up and the 9/11 detour, he explained it today. But, you know, he said that wasn’t the quote that he said.”
“And then you played the quote from Atlantic. I think that he’s very smooth,” Baier concluded while talking to Martha MacCallum about her confronting Ramaswamy with the actual quote of what he had said and later denied saying.
