The Only GOP Candidate Other Than Trump to Have Benefited From His Indictments

Donald Trump’s very grave legal troubles have hurt his polling in the GOP primary not at all. With each new set of charges he has, in fact, consolidated support.

But perhaps the real story is that not only have federal charges not slowed Trump, they haven’t even cleared a lane for just one anti-Trump candidate to advance. Instead, the opposite has happened. The candidate who has gained the most ground in the polls during this season of nonstop indictments is the most pro-Trump candidate in the pool: Vivek Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy sort of has a platform—for instance, he wants to make it illegal for most people under 25 to vote, and he has his own Ten Commandments—but that’s not why he’s ascendant. It’s because he’s running as the only person more Trump than Trump (“Trumpism squared,” as the New York Times has put it). The entire proposal of his candidacy is something like an insurance policy for the die-hards: If Trump is somehow cowed into not running because he’s in a prison cell or too hard up, only Ramaswamy can be trusted to pardon Trump on all charges on Day 1, carry out his wishes, and punish his captors.

It’s working. According to 538 polling averages, Ramaswamy was clocking in at a rock-bottom 1.2 percent on March 31, the day after the first indictment by the Manhattan district attorney. That had him at the back of the pack, trailing even Chris Christie, who also has no real platform other than being anti-Trump, effectively an inverse of Ramaswamy. Two and a half indictments later, Christie has gained only half a percentage point, while Ramaswamy has surged to 7.5 percent in the polling average. Some polls have him cracking double digits nationally: one August poll from Cygnal, Ramaswamy’s own pollster (an A-rated one, according to 538), has him in *second* place nationally for the Republican nomination, at 11 percent. Even if that poll is an outlier, Ramaswamy has clearly broken from the peloton of actual politicians that aren’t DeSantis; Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pence aren’t even close.

The first time I encountered Ramaswamy was in front of the Miami federal courthouse on the morning Trump was set to be arraigned in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Ramaswamy set up a podium in front of the courthouse, donned a very large white trucker hat emblazoned with the word TRUTH, and debuted his pardon pledge to a relatively inattentive audience.

He later sent letters to his rivals (and even to Democratic candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson), demanding they join him in pledging to pardon Trump or, if they refused, demanding an explanation. He swore he would get the entire Republican field on the record to preemptively pardon Trump before the facts of the case were even presented.

Trump die-hards don’t tend to be particularly amenable to People Who Are Not Trump, but Ramaswamy’s gambit has proven to so far be the most effective political maneuver of the Republican presidential primary cycle. He has easily cleared the 40,000 individual-donations threshold to qualify for the Republican primary debates, as well as the national 1 percent polling standard. He has been steadfast in his unwillingness to even admit the fact that the charges brought against Trump are serious, making him the only one in a fabulously obsequious pool of Trump challengers to not concede even that.

The 37-year-old biotech scientist multimillionaire, whose political experience is zero and whose business provenance is hazy—he went to Yale law school but claims he’s primarily a scientist, and made most of his money in finance, before launching an “anti-woke” financial firm, writing two books, and becoming a regular on cable news—got rich on hype and failure. According to the New York Times, “He engineered what was at the time the largest initial public offering in the biotechnology industry’s history—only to see the Alzheimer’s drug at its center fail two years later and the company’s value tank.” Still, he had cashed out a choice moment, hit it rich, and then transitioned to grievance entrepreneurialism. He’s using some of those winnings to self-fund his campaign. He has also tapped into the vein of tech money that is endlessly searching for a conservative home. (He’s known to have close ties to Peter Thiel and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.)

Does Ramaswamy actually want to be president? Probably not. It’s likely he just wants to be famous, and on that count, things are going swimmingly. Arguably they’re going too swimmingly. While Republicans in the field have scrambled to find anything at all to differentiate themselves to voters, Ramaswamy’s pitch of Loving Trump has been almost too effective. He now seems certain to be in the race for a number of debates and will probably make it through early state voting, which means he will have to spend exhausting hours on the campaign trail, likely many more and much longer than he had expected, and more than is necessary for a show on Newsmax or to lock down a low-level White House appointment—perhaps Health and Human Services, given his “expertise.” (The notion of a man running for the presidency despite just wanting a solid TV contract is probably little comfort for most Americans—that was exactly the line of Trump’s 2016 run, right up until the point that he won the Republican nomination and then became the president of the United States.)

That Ramaswamy is much closer to DeSantis in polling than DeSantis is to Trump, despite DeSantis’ $100 million head start, widespread support from Republican billionaire megadonors, and the full force of the News Corp propaganda machine at his back, shows just how weak the governor is. It also shows how complete the hold of Trumpism is on the current Republican party.

It’s not clear how this ends, but if Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy are the three final contenders and are on a debate stage, it seems Ramaswamy will get to either place the crown on Trump’s head, or drive the knife into DeSantis as a volunteer proxy if Trump doesn’t.