Who Is Vivek Ramaswamy and What’s His Plan for America?
Is 38-year-old billionaire businessman Vivek Ramaswamy the most promising presidential candidate so far in the 2024 race, or is he looking to become Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate? Or is he just out for the next possible grifting opportunity?
‘Ignore and inflame’
“Ignore and inflame” is the way political analyst Juan Williams’ September 4, 2023, headline described Ramaswamy’s stance on racism in the online publication The Hill. In this opinion-and-analysis piece, we were reminded of Ramaswamy’s recent comment on the subject on CNN, when he said he couldn’t recall ever meeting a white supremacist.
Surely at least Ramaswamy has seen what the rest of us have seen: As Williams then noted, where was Ramaswamy when a violent white supremacist murdered 10 Black people in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in 2022? That killer had the n-word inscribed on his automatic weapon.
Only a few days after Ramaswamy’s CNN comments, another virulent white supremacist shot and killed three Black people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida. How do we know the shooter was a white supremacist? Among other things, he advertised that fact with the swastika designs adorning his assault-style rifle. “He hated just about everyone” who wasn’t white, the Jacksonville sheriff noted after investigating the shooter’s background. “He made that very clear.”
These, of course, are only two of the most prominent recent examples of the deadly force of white supremacy in this country. In fact, experts believe that about 80 percent of the mass killings tied to extremism in the United States in 2022 were committed by white supremacists.
It sure looks like Ramaswamy delights in being both a provocateur and the only Brown person in rooms filled with wealthy white, ultra-conservative donors. He referred to Ayanna Pressley, a moderate progressive Democrat and the first-ever Black female congressional representative from Massachusetts, as a modern-day “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan, based on an innocuous comment she once made insisting Black Americans advocate for Black issues.
Talking a hard-right policy game
He’s stated a tougher-than-thou immigration and border policy: He says he is willing to send military forces to the Mexican-U.S. border, and to attack Mexican drug cartels—in Mexico—with drone strikes. This ill-advised stance advocating invading a friendly foreign nation echoes that of Trump himself and his nearest competitor in the polls, Florida’s right-wing governor Ron DeSantis.
Ramaswamy also said he wants to end affirmative action and cancel Juneteenth, which we only just managed to have honored as a federal holiday in 2021.
But the candidate also appears to be a flip-flopper. Only months before he declared Juneteenth “useless,” he was all for it, posting on social media that it showed just “how far we’ve come.” He’s made a series of bizarre and contradictory statements on how he sees U.S. relationships with Israel and Taiwan. He’s even flip-flopped on whether or not he believes the conspiracy theory that September 11, 2001, was a government “inside job.”
Culture warrior
His first book was entitled Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, published in 2021. To be fair, some of his criticisms of corporate hypocrisy are well-placed, as when he decried the Walt Disney Company’s protests against DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ legislation after Disney itself has cut profitable deals with China’s repressive regime. But in numerous appearances, the “woke-ism” Ramaswamy denounces has become an ill-defined punching bag for what he sees as all the nation’s cultural ills.
In 2022, he published Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence, with more in the same vein.
It’s hard to see from all of this bluster exactly how a Ramaswamy administration’s actual policies would affect the lives of real, struggling Americans—except for the worse.
Millennial empire-builder
As a September 8 New York Times op-ed by Farhad Manjoo put it, Ramaswamy is a “LinkedIn post come to life.” In the body of that piece, Manjoo also memorably described Ramaswamy as “the epitome of millennial hustle culture.” Maybe to appreciate his particular flavor of throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks, you have to be part of the same socio-political-economic ecosystem. Always self-promoting, always selling, always closing.
Ramaswamy is a first-generation American, born in Cincinnati to immigrant parents from India in 1985. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. He went on to become a partner in a hedge fund firm, and to establish a network of biotech companies with its flagship being pharmaceutical maker Roivant Sciences. His biopharma ventures earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, and Forbes magazine estimates his net worth today at approximately $1 billion. “Stop apologizing for capitalism,” he told a crowd in August 2023.
One aspect of his multifaceted business he doesn’t emphasize is that part of these big earnings actually resulted from his failure to deliver on research into a drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease in 2017.
He also founded Strive, an asset management firm he tried to position as an alternative to big-name players like Vanguard, in 2022. Strive’s backers include noted ultra-right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel.
Political showman
For someone with relatively little national name recognition before he announced his candidacy for the highest office in the world, there really isn’t much downside to a presidential run for Ramaswamy. While every reasonable pundit finds it hard to believe even he himself thinks he can win, Ramaswamy’s campaign has become the perfect side-hustle to fuel the success of his multiple entrepreneurial ventures.
He’s also continued to play to the increasing cruelty of a fair share of the American electorate. On September 8, he told a crowd at an Iowa town hall that if elected, he’d deport the American-born children of undocumented immigrant parents. This, despite the 14th Amendment and established law that confers full citizenship on these children. It’s highly unlikely such a policy could survive a constitutional challenge. But, as we’ve seen consistently with this candidate, the end goal is likely self-promotion and dollar signs.
Former Texas Representative Will Hurd—himself a Black Republican—is among many calling out Ramaswamy for his unserious political stunts.
By late August, after flexing his charisma in the Trump-less Republican debate, Ramaswamy was gaining on Ron DeSantis for the second-place spot in the polls. Stay tuned to see if his extraordinary level of hustle helps him beat the same kind of odds that pretty much every other Brown and Black person in the nation still has to face—whether he believes it or not.