Vivek Ramaswamy Kissed Up to Trump, and Trump Liked It

Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy spent Wednesday night sucking up to Donald Trump, and Trump noticed. After Ramaswamy hailed Trump as “the best president of the 21st century” during the debate (which Trump was notably absent from), and lashed out at nearly every other candidate in the field, the former guy crowned Ramaswamy the debate winner. “This answer gave Vivek Ramaswamy a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post accompanying a video of the 38-year-old political neophyte complimenting the ex-president. “Thank you Vivek!”

And Trump wasn’t the only right-winger taken with Ramaswamy’s performance. Tesla CEO and X (a.k.a. Twitter) owner Elon Musk called him “impressive” and “increasingly compelling” (though Musk, who has called climate change “the biggest threat” to humanity, did question Ramaswamy’s emphatic claim that the “climate change agenda” is a “hoax”: “[Climate change] is possibly overstated in the short term, but we should be concerned about it long term,” Musk wrote in an X post to Ramaswamy).

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped in to call out what she saw as an act of racism against Ramaswamy (yes, we’re talking about the same Marjorie Taylor Greene). “I was pretty disgusted at Chris Christie and his racist comment towards Vivek Ramaswamy,” said Greene, who once spoke at a conference organized by a white nationalist. “He compared him to [Barack] Obama. I honestly thought that was pretty racist.” Alas, Greene misread Christie’s comment; the former New Jersey governor compared Ramaswamy to Obama because in describing himself as a “skinny guy with a funny last name,” Ramaswamy literally cribbed a one-liner Obama used during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Nearly 10 years ago, Obama introduced himself as “a skinny kid with a funny name.”

“The last person…who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama,” Christie lobbed at Ramaswamy on the debate stage. “And I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur.” For what it’s worth, the Obama jab was relatively mild compared to another thrown by Christie. “I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT,” he said of Ramaswamy, interrupting the biotech company founder following his clearly rehearsed line on being the “only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for.” 

For all the love Ramaswamy got from Trump and others after the debate, those onstage with him were clearly tired of his constant interruptions and attacks: Former vice president Mike Pence called him a “rookie”; South Carolina senator Tim Scott scolded him for being “childish”; and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley told Ramaswamy he has “no foreign policy experience, and it shows.” Doing his best Trump imitation, Ramaswamy hit right back, accusing Christie of traveling to Ukraine to worship his “pope,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and telling Haley that she would have a “future career on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon.”

Shtick or not, Ramaswamy’s combativeness—not to mention his fealty to Trump and extreme positions—clearly got viewers’ attention. He won the Drudge Report’s postdebate poll (though its surveys can be less than scientific), and a majority of participants on a CNN panel of Iowa Republicans also believed he won the debate. Meanwhile, a Washington Post analysis of Google search trends found that Ramaswamy, who was already on an upward swing before the debate, consistently outpaced his onstage competitors. Ramaswamy was polling in third behind Trump and Ron DeSantis going into Wednesday night. It wouldn’t be entirely surprising to see him bumped up to second place in future surveys. But then again, second place is still a far cry from Trump’s commanding lead.

Riley Keough on Growing Up Presley, Inheriting Graceland, and More

Ivanka Trump Is Not Letting Her Dad’s Mounting Legal Woes Ruin Her Summer