Vivek Ramaswamy Channels His Hero Trump By Aiming Word ‘Vermin’ At San Francisco’s Homeless
Proving he learned nothing from the outrage aimed at Donald Trump’s use of the Nazi-tinged word, “vermin,” Vivek Ramaswamy employed the very word himself to describe San Francisco’s homeless and drug-addicted.
CNN’s Abby Philip asked Ramaswamy about Trump’s remarks at a Veterans Day rally that included the line,“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Historians, journalists, and even President Joe Biden likened the former president’s language to “Nazi rhetoric.”
“This is a classic mainstream media move: pick some individual phrase of Donald Trump. Focus, literally, on that word rather than interrogating the substance of what’s at issue,” Ramaswamy said. “We are in the middle of a culture war in this country.”
“The word was chosen for a reason,” Philip shot back.
“It’s actually describing a series of behaviors,” Ramaswamy said. “You have Antifa and other related groups that have been burning down cities for the last three years in this country.”
“Would you describe them as vermin?” Philip asked as Ramaswamy talked about the “invasion” on the southern border. “Would you use that language yourself?”
“Well, I haven’t used that language,” Ramaswamy said. “What I’m not going to do is play some game of focusing on some word that somebody else said, ignoring entirely the substance of what we’re actually talking about…You know what’s vermin? What’s running around San Francisco on a given day, before Gavin Newsom cleaned it up on a dime, to role out the red carpet for XI Jinping.
“If he can do that for the Xi Jinping, he could’ve done it on an ordinary day. And yet we’re sitting here talking not about the substance of that, but on one word that Donald Trump said in some speech in Miami. This is what’s wrong with the mainstream media. Focus on the substance and let’s have an actual policy debate, rather than talking to a presidential candidate, instead of the policy substance of what’s actually going on in the country, picking on some word that Donald Trump said on a certain day and asking me for comment on it. Give me a break.”
As Philip tried to explain how the former president referring to people on the left as vermin was actually a substantive thing, Ramaswamy continued: “Look at the way people are living in San Francisco, normally.”
Watch the clip above via CNN.
