Vivek Ramaswamy’s vision is America first — even more than Trump

While Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are busy tearing chunks out of each other, there is an unlikely sleeper candidate in the Republican race who is quietly winning hearts and awakening hope across the country with his sunny version of America First.

Vivek Ramaswamy, 37, the woke-busting entrepreneur, son of Indian immigrants from Ohio and the GOP’s first millennial presidential candidate, is rising steadily in opinion polls, just 10 weeks after announcing his candidacy on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. 

In one CBS poll this week, he managed to tie with former VP Mike Pence in third place among likely Republican voters, ahead of establishment figures such as Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Tim Scott and Asa Hutchinson.

He’s pitching himself as a more energetic but less divisive version of Trump, as “the outsider that doesn’t just talk about draining the swamp,” he said in New Hampshire this week. “I’m going to get the job done . . . I see an opportunity to do in 2020 what Ron­ald Reagan did in 1980, win a landslide election.”

He preaches that it is not enough merely to point out the hypocrisies of the left’s “secular religions” of “racial wokeism, gender ideology and the climate cult.”

These are just symptoms of a national identity crisis, he says, caused by turning away from the founding values of the country, from success by merit and adherence to the rule of law, values that wooed immigrants like his Indian engineer father and psychiatrist mother to Ohio.

“Faith, patriotism, hard work, family, these things have disappeared,” he says, and he wants to “fill that void with a vision of American national identity that dilutes this woke poison.”

With irrepressible charm, the father of two little boys has managed so far to maintain a friendship with Trump and avoid the ex-president’s ire, but his entire pitch is an implicit repudiation of the older man. 

“I’m taking the America First agenda even further than Donald Trump did . . . but I also think I’ll unite the country in the process [because if] you’re doing it based on ‘first’ principles and moral authority, then you can actually go further with the agenda instead of just doing it based on vengeance and grievance.

“America First does not belong to Trump. It does not belong to me. It belongs to the people of this country . . . That’s what we have to keep in mind, not just personal vengeance, and grievance.”

Not to mention, as he likes to point out often, “I’m less than half of either Trump’s or Biden’s age. I’ve got fresh legs. 

“Trump was an outsider in 2015 but you only get to be an outsider once. Now Trump is the establishment and I’m the new outsider in the race.”

Securing the border

Trump just “talked about building the wall. I’m using the military to secure the border.” He says that again, unlike Trump, he will shut down the Department of Education and end race-based affirmative action “because that’s how you actually drain the swamp, not just by talking about it.”

Ramaswamy is unimpressed by Trump’s suggestion that he might boycott the primary debates.

“He’d better debate,” Ramaswamy told a radio station in Keene Tuesday in a one-hour in-studio interview meeting with 60 locals for breakfast at a nearby diner. 

“I’m not going to make it easy for him to cower in fear . . . that is cowardice. Donald Trump in 2015 embraced that debate stage. I think that will be our best evidence that the Donald Trump of today is not the same man that actually existed in 2015, if he hides from that debate stage.”

Ramaswamy also damns DeSantis with faint praise. 

“I think he’s an implementer, a good implementer,” Ramaswamy said of the Florida governor, before decrying DeSantis’ lack of vision and calling Ron’s anti-woke battle with Disney “the Mickey Mouse debacle . . . they outsmarted him.”

Ramaswamy says he is self-funding his own campaign with the hundreds of millions of dollars he made from the successful biotech business he founded, while DeSantis is claiming he is “shackled” by his donors: “It’s not his fault. It’s just the way the system works.”

On the “corrupt . . . crony capitalism” of recent bank bailouts, Ramaswamy claims DeSantis “did not say a peep because some of his biggest donors were the very people that got bailed out.”

‘Uncourageous’

“Shutting down the administrative state, an existing professional politician is not going to get the job done, because they are too shackled by the donor class to take on the issues I’m taking on, from the climate religion to affirmative action and using the military to secure the border.”

Ramaswamy also accused DeSantis of being “uncourageous [for] hiding from NBC News.”

Ramaswamy’s recent clashes with two liberal TV hosts, NBC’s Chuck Todd and CNN’s Don Lemon, were cited admiringly by New Hampshire voters at appearances this week.

Andy Locke, a 44-year-old pastor from Goffstown, came to see Ramaswamy speak in Bedford Tuesday night because he loved Ramaswamy’s bestseller “Woke Inc.” and thought his demolition of Lemon over racial-identity politics was “fantastic.”

Army reservist Luke Hansen 19, from Goffstown, first heard Ramaswamy on a Jordan Peterson podcast. Hansen likes Ramaswamy’s criticism of “corporate governmental collusion . . . I’m curious to see what happens with him because a lot of time, when you have politicians and they are openly talking against the powers in the background, they get shut down and I hope that doesn’t happen . . .”

Madeline Mailhot, 16, from New Boston, NH, found Ramaswamy to be “a candidate who could make a huge change . . . someone who is not afraid of the truth. He’s saying the things that people are afraid to say.” 

Her mother Debbie Mailhot, a 49-year-old pediatric nurse and registered independent who tends to vote Republican, says she likes DeSantis, is “neutral” about Trump, but is open to Ramaswamy. 

“I appreciate that he’s younger and he comes from no politics, which is what got Trump in . . .

“I think we need to be a little bit more compassionate. I think we need to stand for the right things with reasoning that makes sense to people, not just rhetoric, not just angering people.”

Let’s see how angry Ramaswamy makes Trump as the upstart’s star rises.