Vivek Ramaswamy Leaves Social Media After Angering Republicans With TPUSA Speech

AP Photo/Abbie Parr

Republican politician Vivek Ramaswamy announced his decision to leave social media on Monday, just weeks after angering many members of his own party with a controversial speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal titled, “Social Media Is a Trap for Politicians,” Ramaswamy revealed his plans to “become a social-media teetotaler in 2026” in response to the backlash he had been receiving on Elon Musk’s platform X.

“On New Year’s Eve, I deleted X and Instagram from my phone. I’ll spend my newfound time listening to more voters in real-world Ohio, developing more policies to make our state affordable, and being more present with my family,” he wrote. “I predict that ending my consumption of social media will make me a better leader and a happier man.”

Ramaswamy noted that while his campaign team would still operate his social media accounts on his behalf, he would not “browse any of it myself,” citing the “negative and bombastic” messages he had been receiving since his poorly-received speech at AmericaFest last month.

“I delivered a speech arguing that the U.S. is a nation defined above all by ideals, not shared bloodlines. Based on social-media comments beforehand, I expected to be booed. If you scrolled through them after, you’d believe that’s what happened,” he wrote. “But in reality, I received a standing ovation from a politically engaged audience of well over 20,000 attendees.”

Ramaswamy also cited the “spate of shocking racial slurs and worse on social media” as further reason to leave.

Ramaswamy’s Republican challenger in the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election, Casey Putsch, mocked his opponent’s decision to leave social media, writing, “Which is it, Vivek? Should politicians engage with their voters on social media or not? Why are you really leaving X? I’m not going anywhere.”

The former Republican presidential candidate angered many members of his own party in December after he suggested that immigrants to the United States were just as American as those whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 and had been in the country for hundreds of years.

“I think the idea of a ‘heritage American’ is about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up. There is no American who is more American than somebody else,” he said. “Either you’re an American or you’re not.”

While Ramaswamy received applause from the audience at AmericaFest, his speech received heavy backlash from Republicans on social media.

The moment marked the second time that Ramaswamy angered Republicans during the Christmas period, having previously received backlash over a Christmas social media post in 2024.

In the post, Ramaswamy criticized an alleged culture of “mediocrity” in the United States and suggested that immigrant parents were better at raising their children than parents born in the U.S.

The incident, dubbed Ramaswamy’s “Christmas Crash Out,” caused many supporters of Ramaswamy to turn on him.