Vivek Ramaswamy is Not Trump’s Tempo

In less time than it took the rest of us to nuke our holiday leftovers, former DOGE co-director Vivek Ramaswamy managed to utterly obliterate his nascent political career. Blame the lull of the post-Christmas dead week. Or what seemed like his mistaking X as a submission portal for an Entertainment Weekly essay contest about the inspirational power of Steve Urkel and that maniac music professor from Whiplash. Regardless, the ensuing political fallout makes the still-memeable woogirl moment that put the kibosh on Howard Dean’s political career two decades ago now seem downright charming. 

Arguing for the necessity of importing Indian labor via H-1B visas while lobbing bombs at the jocks who Breakfast Clubbed him in high school, Ramaswamy offered up the blanket statement that America venerates mediocrity over excellence to the tune of over 118 million views. Few, if any, of these reactions trended positive. Tiger moms vs. wine moms wasn’t quite the debate the American people wanted to have as they and their families lied on the couch in food comas the day after Christmas among the remnants of homemade gingerbread men.

For the next two weeks, Vivek went radio silent on social media while trying to stop the hemorrhaging. But, while Musk got a free pass for sharing such views thanks to his own H-1B bona fides, Vivek’s D.C. coronation was over before it began. Trump reportedly dumped him from DOGE because of the blowback. Steve Bannon felt especially betrayed as the MAGA kingmaker who gave Ramaswamy an early forum in the pandemic days when the upstart was hawking his first book, Woke, Inc.

Thus began a flurry of subterfuge. Ramaswamy was winding down his time at DOGE early to take Vance’s Senate Seat. When news broke that he officially lost that appointment, he denied, then admitted he was readying a run for Ohio governor instead. Following in the footsteps of former Trumpworld power players on Dancing with Stars or The Masked Singer is still not yet outside the realm of possibility. 

Since he nudged his way to the highest echelons of politics, the former CEO of pharmaceutical company Roivant has faced an onslaught of criticism. Allegations range from accepting a generous scholarship to Yale Law funded in part by Soros money while already a millionaire (yawn) to kowtowing to DEI policies so he could attract ESG-minded investors to goosing an IPO for an Alzheimer’s drug with a successful trial his researcher mother conducted that other scientists debunked shortly after the financial windfall. 

Before last month, such controversies were no match for Ramaswamy’s unparalleled gifts for prescience and persuasion. It was his refusal to sound like his Republican rivals that—like his boss for all of seven weeks—allowed him to rise so quickly up the ranks in the first place. 

With Woke, Inc. Ramaswamy fired the first legitimate shots in the CRT crusade even though his successors like Christopher Rufo and Matt Walsh more immediately reaped the celebrity spoils. Likewise, his colloquial nature and knack for disarming protestors on the campaign trail cemented his brand as a charismatic big tenter unafraid to go toe to toe with any adversary. 

As I saw firsthand watching Ramaswamy and Senator Marsha Blackburn talk crypto at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville last summer, MAGA would likely have never found its post-2020 footing without Ramaswamy. He’s the guy who plows through reams of research and writes thoughtful books about the subjects that most of his contemporaries are content tweeting about.  And, as he makes clear with his most recent book, Truths: The Future of America First, such on-point messaging will be vital to sustaining Trumpian successes beyond the midterms and 2028. 

From its opening lines, Truths reminds readers that Trump’s greatest strength has always been his resistance to historical orthodoxy. Yet, Ramaswamy shares a word of caution about the neoliberal consensus on its deathbed: it didn’t fail primarily because of its blind spots toward the negative consequences that led to its unwinding. The root cause was an “intellectual laziness” that turned Uniparty dogma into a series of empty buzzwords unable to connect with anyone but the indoctrinated.

As Ramaswamy posits, the appeal of Trump’s agenda to a wide swath of disparate Americans contains the seeds of its own undoing because it runs the risk of simultaneously entertaining opposed philosophies. Republicans tout the next four years as the death knell for government overreach while praising aggressive tariff policy. RFK, Jr’s planned ban on dyes and additives is a great moment for Americans’ liberation from Big Food—but one only achievable through the full force of the state. They applaud Trump for threatening to dismantle the Department of Education or the FBI, yet excitedly brandish the firebrand credentials of his appointments to properly manage whichever reviled three letter org over the next four years. 

Even the most vocal Trump supporter has to feel some sort of reservations about these philosophical contradictions. Indeed, New York magazine’s Sam Adler-Bell offered a less charitable view of such a rickety ship in his last column before Viviek’s holiday transgressions. The opening pages of this New York “Intelligencer” section feature Trump as The Godfather’s Don Corleone culling favor with the haphazardly gathered “nationalists, misfits, Reaganites, and dorks” who propelled him to victory before shrugging as his sycophants eat each other alive. This is no team of rivals for Adler-Bell and those of his ilk. It’s a simple spoils system distributed to the loyal underlings with varying ideological underpinnings that the legacy journo gleefully proclaims will spell doom for 47th’s intended agenda. 

But Vivek (and, so far, only Vivek) prescribes a corrective to the quite real threat of these “seismic’ ideological fissures. The current brand of polymorphous conservatism is “unapologetically nationalist” and rejects the old neoliberal consensus on foreign policy, trade and immigration,” but organizes itself into two opposed factions: 

The first wing, which Ramaswamy deems “National Patronage,” takes an isolationist stance on trade via strict tariffs and uses the powers of big government to subsidize critical sectors while integrating the appropriate checks and balances on overreach. It’s well regulated federalism solely for the sake of multifaceted national security. 

In contrast, the “National Liberty” wing hopes to curb the worst impulses of libertarian and neoliberal thought, by creating baseline protections for national security and national identity while protecting the free trade its adherents see as fundamental to the American experiment. It’s a battle of redirecting vs. dismantling the regulatory state with Adler-Bell’s MAGA taxonomy as Publius and Co. rather than a rotating cast of Mortal Kombat second-stringers. 

Consequently, Ramaswamy’s intent is to negotiate a set of truths universally acknowledged that will allow the Trump agenda to flourish, an anchor to cling to as policy proposals threaten to ramp up the infighting that got the president ejected from the office in the first place. 

Throughout the book, Ramaswany offers chapter-length suggestions on the tenets Trump and his team should build on: God is real, the climate change agenda is a joke, facts are not conspiracies,  reverse racism is racism, “an open border is not a border,” there are three branches of U.S. government, not four, among others.

Yet, Ramaswaamy is no essentialist. He flourishes amid the caveats, all the while showing just how binary the left’s thinking is. He does not “deny climate change;” he interrogates the flimsy nature of its solutions and their potential for their proponents’ self enrichment. He proves himself adept at countering easy sneers that paint some corners of MAGA as fringe like, “9/11 is an inside job” through a belief in a well-sourced barrage of inconvenient facts.

Ironically, the finest moment of Truths is Ramaswamy’s gripping discourse on the differences between categorical and scaler conceptions of citizenship. For example, categorical ways of understanding immigration govern the inferences that can lead some to feel an American-born citizen who grew up in Germany and maintains dual citizenship is a model candidate for federal office, while a scaler approach offers that full-fledged citizens who are first or second-generation immigrants should be met with unshakeable skepticism. It’s a serious attempt to come to terms with the definitions of “American” that reverberate through every thread of the Trump agenda. 

As Truths proves, Vivek’s unforced error was not a wayward tweet; it was his misplaced faith that the type of thorough and spirited debate that forged the nation in the first place would somehow immediately return to form once the woke scolds and cancel culture crowd scurried back to the shadows or the cuddly embrace of BlueSky. Without Elon Musk buying Twitter, Trump may never have won reelection. But that platform and its ever-diminishing marketplace of ideas may someday make Viveks of us all. 

Truths: The Future of America First is now available in hardcover from booksellers everywhere.