After causing an uproar by criticizing American culture, Vivek Ramaswamy has been biding his time and hoping this storm will pass without jeopardizing his promising MAGA career.
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Everything seemed to be going great for Vivek Ramaswamy. However, after a crucial miscalculation (which is ironic because this is also a story about math) that put him on the bad side of the vast anti-immigration wing of the MAGA movement, he now appears to be lying low to ride out the storm he caused.
And all of that just because he wanted to Make America Geeky Again.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Right until the end, 2024 was a great year for Ramaswamy, who has shown a knack for riding the right coattails.
After strategically “running” for president in a way that kept him in Donald Trump’s good graces, he became a fixture in the incoming president’s inner circle and built a prominent presence on MAGA Twitter/X.
In less than five years, he tweeted just under 15,000 times, i.e., an average of 50+ posts per week (keep that number in mind).
For good reason, Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is frequently described as a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.
In the many videos of himself that he shared online, he eloquently talks about the greatness of America, the importance of cutting costs and regulations, and, of course, how awesome Donald Trump is, i.e., the kind of thing Republicans gobble up.
Ever the opportunist, Ramaswamy then parlayed his newly established credentials as an anti-government libertarian into a spot on Elon Musk’s pet project, the “DOGE.”
Together, Trump tasked the two of them with slashing government spending, which may conveniently entail hamstringing the kind of agencies that a couple of billionaires may want to defund.
And, of course, since Trump is term-limited and Musk is ineligible to become president, it probably doesn’t matter to Ramaswamy if he has to play second fiddle to both of them for a couple of years while establishing himself as an enemy of the dreaded administrative state.
Simply by hitching his wagon to these two MAGA thoroughbreds, he put himself in a strong position to launch another presidential bid in 2028 — this time for real.
But then December 26 happened. That was the day when Ramaswamy miscalculated in a way that put a real damper in all those lofty plans.
And “miscalculating” is putting it nicely. It’s simply not overly bright to tell a bunch of proud, red-blooded American xenophobes that they care too much about football and not enough about their math homework, which is why companies have to import smart people from outside the US because other countries are simply doing a better job.
Those weren’t precisely his words, but that’s the gist of it.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
It didn’t go over so well.
As it turns out, those proud patriots are fine with having a guy named Vivek Ramaswamy telling them that the U-S-A is number one, but they feel less positive about being told that American greatness hinges on a bunch of Indians getting hired.
Even though he got the enthusiastic backing of Musk and the less enthusiastic backing of Trump, both of whom feel very strongly about hiring cheap foreign workers rather than overpaying lazy Americans, the damage was done.
For a couple of days, he tried to do some damage control by assuring various incensed right-wing influencers that he is still on Team America, and then attempting to change the conversation back to “government is bad.”
Overall, Ramaswamy tweeted, retweeted, and replied to others about two dozen times in the 48 hours after his controversial post, but then he apparently thought better of it and just stopped.
So far this year, he has posted just twice (once congratulating Ohio’s new senator and the other time about how family should live closer to each other), which means he hasn’t even congratulated Trump on the certification of his election victory or made a comment about how the attack on the Capitol wasn’t so bad after all (which is what all of the other MAGA luminaries did).
It will be interesting to see what happens next, especially because Ramaswamy has a prominent role to play in GOP efforts to slash government funding. That might put him back into the good graces of the Republican base, but it is also possible that he may never fully recover from this misstep, which would then be very illustrative of where Trump supporters draw the line.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
