Vivek Ramaswamy’s no good, very bad week

First-time presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy emerged from 2024’s first Republican primary debate as the party’s most talked-about candidate. Online searches for Ramaswamy surged in the days following the Milwaukee slugfest, and the businessman-turned-politician seems to be everywhere in the media — from a combative turn on “Meet the Press” to a Monday night throwdown with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

Unfortunately for Team Vivek, all that media coverage is causing more of a headache than his handlers anticipated. The problem appears to be Ramaswamy himself — or, more specifically, Ramaswamy’s botched attempts to run away from his own on-the-record statements. And unlike Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, Ramaswamy lacks a built-in base of loyalists willing to spin his bizarre blunders.

On Monday night, Ramaswamy sat down for what should have been a softball interview with Fox’s most outspokenly conservative anchor, Sean Hannity. The conversation quickly derailed when Hannity called out Ramaswamy for misrepresenting his position on ending aid to Israel.

When Ramaswamy claimed Hannity was misquoting him, the anchor doubled down, offering to read Ramaswamy’s exact quote to the audience. Hannity’s unexpected jab sent Ramaswamy into a cascade of stutters and stumbles — and revealed how much of Ramaswamy’s campaign strategy depends on doing interviews with reporters who won’t challenge his ideas.

That Ramaswamy’s grift proved too transparent even for Hannity should be a warning sign not just to Republican primary voters, but to the American people. After four ruinous years of Donald Trump, voters are well aware of what happens when we elect a president willing to say anything to capture media attention. And, like Trump, Ramaswamy revels in his unwillingness to learn how the government actually functions.

Maybe Ramaswamy is off his game after a tough weekend that included a “Meet the Press” appearance where the candidate, who has proposed requiring young voters to pass a civics test in order to vote, had no idea about what the vice president could and couldn’t do. When asked what he would have done differently from Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, Ramaswamy offered a list of impossible proposals.

“We need single-day voting on Election Day, we need paper ballots, and we need government- issued ID matching the voter file,” Ramaswamy said. “And if we achieve that, then we have achieved victory and we should not have any further complaint about election integrity. I would have driven it through the Senate. In my capacity as president of the Senate, I would have led through that level of reform, then on that condition certified the election results.”

There’s just one problem: the vice president’s role as president of the Senate is entirely ceremonial. Not only would a Vice President Ramaswamy be unable to introduce the legislation he proposed, he certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed any authority to force legislation on the Senate as a condition of performing the vice president’s constitutional duty of certifying election results.

And this is the guy who claims young people just don’t understand how our government works.

Ramaswamy’s impractical — and illegal — idea represents the latest iteration of Trumpism: that if Republicans can simply elect enough like-minded MAGA loyalists to power, they can effectively bend the long-standing rules of government to suit their short-term political needs. The details of actual governing have always been less interesting to Trump’s loyalists than the thrill of exerting sweeping power over others. 

The Constitution bars Republicans from implementing their self-serving political fantasies. Ramaswamy’s response is to challenge anyone who disagrees to try and stop him. What’s so shocking is that long-time Republican loyalists, including Hannity, former Vice President Mike Pence and others, are so willing to call Ramaswamy out for lacking even a basic understanding of the government he so readily seeks to undermine.

Any candidate seeking the presidency should be motivated first and foremost by a respect for the rule of law and a desire to faithfully execute the office they seek. Vivek Ramaswamy’s lightweight campaign reveals him to be a candidate without the slightest concern for consistency or serious thinking — even when given the simple task of explaining his own past public statements.

The Republican Party already has its incoherent standard-bearer in runaway frontrunner Donald Trump. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be taken seriously as a top-tier presidential contender. Before that happens, he’ll need to make sense of his own garbled political beliefs. As Ramaswamy keeps demonstrating on national television, that’s a task easier said than done.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.