Vivek Ramaswamy: The Spontaneous, Uncoached Candidate Who Wasn’t

One of the most striking moments of the first Republican presidential primary debate last month came when Vivek Ramaswamy, the young, upstart candidate who’s carved out a lane for himself as Donald Trump’s lead-blocker, attempted to draw a contrast between himself and his more politically experienced competition.

“Listen, now that everybody has gotten their memorized, pre-prepared slogans out of the way, we can actually have a real discussion now,” he declared. “The reality and the fact of the matter is-”

“Is that one of yours?” interjected former Vice President Mike Pence.

“Not really, Mike,” insisted Ramaswamy. “We’re just going to have some fun tonight. And the reality is, you have a bunch of people, professional politicians, super PAC puppets, following slogans handed over to them by their 400-page super PACs last week. The real choice we face in this primary is this. Do you want a super PAC puppet, or do you want a patriot who speaks the truth?”

Despite the entrepreneur turned politician’s protests, might Pence have been on to something?

Ramaswamy has repeatedly slammed both the political consulting industry and the candidates who rely on it, while promising that he says only “what’s coming from the heart, my bone-deep convictions.”

“I think the person we put in the White House next needs to be a person who’s telling you what they actually believe,” submitted Ramaswamy in March. “Their own original perspectives, rather than just channeling what a class of political consultants told them to say,”

“So the way it works,” he explained in another, “is you’ve got these professional mercenaries who are like the political consultant class and the fundraiser class. Candidates are like commodities, they come and go and they’re their little shiny toy. But these people continue to make money off of that system. It is an industry. It is a massive, ugly underbelly of an industry.”

“Many of them are trying to make money off of me, okay? So I see how this game’s played,” he added.

They’re not trying to make money off of Ramaswamy, though. They are making money off of his campaign, which had spent nearly $770,000 on consultants through the second quarter of 2023, including nearly $300,000 on media consulting and around $440,000 in political strategy consulting.

Now it might be unfair to castigate Ramaswamy as a hypocrite for merely spending campaign funds on vendors; it’s hard to imagine a campaign that could operate without sometimes leaning on the consultant class.

But it would appear that Ramaswamy has not only spent money on consultants, but lifted lines from them.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the Ramaswamy campaign is a firm connected to former Pennsylvania Senate candidate Kathy Barnette, who called the January 6 protests “our 1776 moment,” helped arrange for the travel of three buses full of participants to Washington, D.C. that day, and referred to Democrats as “Demons in Drag.” Her firm hauled in more than $124,000 from his campaign.

What’s more, either Ramaswamy and Barnette share so much in common — a unique mind-meld of sorts — that he is inadvertently repeating lines from her own failed Senate campaign, or he’s been allowed to lift them in exchange for his patronage.

As a primary candidate last spring, Barnette was snubbed by Trump, who instead threw his weight behind Dr. Mehmet Oz. Her response was to declare on separate occasions that “MAGA doesn’t belong to Donald Trump; MAGA belongs to the people,” and “President Trump coined the word but the word itself Make America Great Again belongs to the people.”

Compare that to Ramaswamy — who faces a similar dilemma due to Trump’s presence in his own race:

April 27, 2023: “America First does not belong to Donald Trump. It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to those voters we just looked at. It belongs to the people of this country.”

August 12, 2023: “MAGA, America First, this is bigger than one man. It does not belong to me. It does not belong to Trump. It belongs to you. It belongs to us, we the people.”

September 22, 2023: “The America First agenda does not belong to one man. Does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to me. It belongs to you, the people of this country.”

In addition, one of the Ramaswamy campaign’s most notable controversies from last month appears to have its roots in Barnette’s campaign.

In 2021, Barnette wrote that Dr. Ibram X. Kendi “sounds like the Grand Wizard of the KKK!”

In August 2023, Ramaswamy concurred. After quoting Kendi and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), he characterized their words as those of “the modern grand wizards of the modern KKK.”

The repetition of lines seemingly fed to him by his most highly-paid consultant is not the only phenomenon that might shatter the illusion of Vivek, the spontaneous, uncoached candidate.

Over time, Ramaswamy’s views on Trump, the January 6 Capitol riot, and Pence’s handling of them have evolved — or, more candidly, changed beyond recognition.

In his 2022 book, Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence, Ramaswamy wrote that January 6 was a “dark day for democracy,” and offered a simple explanation of its cause: “The loser of the last election refused to concede the race” and “claimed the election was stolen.”

“While Trump promised to lead the nation to recommit itself to the pursuit of greatness, what he delivered in the end was just another tale of grievance,” he continued before assailing Trump for being a “sore loser” and taking “a page from the Stacey Abrams playbook.”

Thankfully, argued Ramaswamy, “Mike Pence, a man I have great respect for, decided it was his constitutional duty to resist the president’s attempts to get him to unilaterally overturn the results of the election, even in the face of the January 6 Capitol riot.”

But on the campaign trail, candidate Ramaswamy has sung a different tune.

During a July conversation with Tucker Carlson, he insisted that “what caused January 6th is pervasive censorship in this country,” rather than Trump’s lies. Then in a video released after Trump was indicted for the events of January 6, he repeated that claim. “It is wrong and incorrect and inaccurate to place blame for what happened on January 6 at the feet of Donald Trump,” he argued.

On the debate stage with Pence last month, Ramaswamy did not affirm that Pence had done the right thing by certifying the results of the 2020 election, instead haranguing him about promising to pardon Trump should he win the 2024 election.

Afterwards, he said that he would have handled the day “very differently” from Pence:

I think I would have done it very differently. I would have done very differently. So I think that there was a historic opportunity that was missed to settle a score in this country to say that we’re actually going to have a national compromise on this — single-day voting on Election Day as a federal holiday, which I think Congress should have acted in that window between November and January to say: paper ballots, government-issued ID. And if that’s the case, then we’re not going to complain about stolen elections. And if I were there, I would have declared on January 7th, saying now I’m going to win in a free and fair election. Unlike what we saw with Big Tech and others stealing the election last time around, fix the process. This time around, we get it right, and it was a missed opportunity to deliver national unity. That’s what I would have done, but that’s what I’m gonna be able to do as president is unite this country.

Ramaswamy has made much political hay out of his purported disgust with the entrenched political class. But his expenditures, use of consultant-delivered canned lines, and easy discarding of his “bone-deep convictions” betray his claim to being the one, true uncoached candidate in the Republican primary field.