Trump Won’t Be at the Debate. But Vivek Ramaswamy Will.

When I first wrote about Vivek Ramaswamy back in early May, the youthful Republican candidate was still more a figure of intrigue than a viable contender for the presidency. Ron DeSantis, who hadn’t officially joined the race, remained the biggest threat to Donald Trump’s GOP dominance; the two Florida men’s most prominent challengers were establishment has-beens jockeying for single-digit polling numbers (Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, etc.). Within this unholy sphere, Ramaswamy couldn’t help but stand out. A clean-cut 38-year-old Indian American from the Midwest, a family man with oodles of interpersonal charm, a religious son of high-caste Hindu immigrants, a biotech entrepreneur and anti–social justice warrior with no prior experience in Washington—what could be more refreshing for the GOP than all this? Simultaneously, Ramaswamy was making what seemed like a serious bid by bashing DeSantis and worshipping Trump, allowing MAGA types to glom on to his promise to advance a “positive” vision of America First nationalism. This earned Ramaswamy some notable traction, alongside bemused reactions from conservative observers. Trump liked him, as did Fox News. National Review writers were skeptical, as were DeSantis boosters. Still, in spite of the occasional viral moment, Ramaswamy remained mostly an unknown.

Three months later, things are looking more auspicious for Ramaswamy’s candidacy. On the eve of the first 2024 GOP debate—for which Ramaswamy qualified even before Mike Pence did—this neophyte may even be in a stronger position than his much-better-known rivals. For one, DeSantis’ formerly hyped campaign has repelled many onetime supporters with a potent combination of personal awkwardness and Nazi memeage. Quite a few of those defectors are now embracing Ramaswamy.

It’s so bad that DeSantis’ team is now explicitly recommending that the candidate “take a sledgehammer” to Ramaswamy at the debate by calling him names like “Vivek the Fake.” (Pedantic note: Vivek rhymes much more closely with ek, the Hindi word for “one,” than it does with the wider-vowel fake.) As my colleague Alexander Sammon astutely noted, Trump’s multiple indictments this summer didn’t harm Trump’s or Ramaswamy’s polling—instead, they seemed to clear the way for the latter to be perceived as “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.” There are plenty of polls showing Ramaswamy outpacing better-known challengers like Tim Scott, although Politico’s Steven Shepard notes that Ramaswamy tends to do better in online polls than in more-traditional phone surveys. But even that could soon change: On Saturday, a hybrid phone-online poll from Emerson College found Ramaswamy tied with DeSantis for second, with the former gaining about as much support as the latter lost over the summer.

Whether they’re a result of circumstantial luck or actual political savvy, Ramaswamy’s heightened profile and appeal are now undeniable, and political observers are catching on. Monday alone saw some hefty new journalistic profiles of Ramaswamy: from the Atlantic, a campaign-trail saga; from ABC News, a collection of anonymous anecdotes from erstwhile associates that accuse Ramaswamy of mere clout-chasing; from Forbes (which, back in 2014, had placed him on the 30 Under 30), an accounting of how Ramaswamy briefly became a billionaire earlier this year. With DeSantis in decline and Trump skipping the debate altogether, the other GOP candidates are homing in on Ramaswamy, likely parsing all these biographical details for debate attack fodder. As the Washington Post reported, “Advisers to several candidates … said the [debate] stage is likely to serve as a venue to litigate the inconsistencies in Ramaswamy’s policy statements.”

Those inconsistencies won’t be hard to find. As even Fox News points out, Ramaswamy implied in early May that Trump would be a “coward” if he didn’t show up to debate, but now he says it’s “OK” if Trump misses the first few Republican forums. Trump will be an unavoidable elephant in the room, but the other candidates will likely dig into Ramaswamy’s foreign policy, some aspects of which they’re adopting (namely, dispatching armed forces to battle Mexican drug cartels), others of which they firmly oppose (his Putin-favoring proposal for Russia-Ukraine peace, his desire to arm Taiwanese citizens against China only until the United States no longer depends on the democratic island for semiconductors). Haley is already laying into Ramaswamy for suggesting he would reduce American funds delegated to Israel. The fact that “Ramaswamy has spent the past few months engaged in ‘a lot’ of foreign policy briefings,” as Semafor reported, doesn’t seem to be helping him much.

Maybe his stans don’t give a fig about foreign policy. Even then, the most effective attacks against Ramaswamy will likely come from odder sources altogether, like his continuous 9/11 gaffes. Seriously: a BlazeTV interview in which he didn’t exactly say no when the interviewer asked whether the attacks were an “inside job,” a follow-up Tucker Carlson interview where he attempted to clarify that he meant “the 9/11 Commission lied,” and then a bit from the aforementioned Atlantic profile where he declares, “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero.” (After Ramaswamy told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday that he had been misquoted, the Atlantic reporter released audio of the exchange, making it clear Ramaswamy had … not been misquoted.) His competitors will perhaps also find it legitimate to ask why Ramaswamy harps on this kind of thing.

There are still more bizarre lines on his résumé, like Bloomberg’s recent report on how employees from the “anti-woke” hedge fund he co-founded in 2022 have sued him for “misrepresent[ing] the company’s finances to employees and investors,” “aggressively pushing employees to violate securities law,” and retaliating against a worker “for raising concerns about sexual harassment at the firm.” Going back even further, consider his biotech startup Roivant, which only ever produced a handful of approved commercial drugs despite fundraising billions of dollars over a yearslong period. Or his repurposing of Trumpian branding to the extent that his all-caps, block-lettered TRUTH logo closely resembles that of Trump’s own Truth Social network. Or his critiques of the Hunter Biden probe juxtaposed with his purported willingness to pardon Hunter should Ramaswamy take the White House (what is the position here, honestly?). Or his quippy description of himself as a “nonwhite nationalist.” Or his campaign’s frequent habit of paying Wikipedia editors to remove certain details from his page. Or the whispers from past associates that this run is all a publicity charade (“It’s clear that he’s been wanting to be famous for a long time”).

Vivek Ramaswamy has gotten remarkably far in his long-shot race, and his well-spoken (if obfuscatory and verbose) rhetorical style will serve him well in Wednesday’s debate—at which he’ll take a center-stage position, right next to DeSantis. But for Ramaswamy’s campaign to really take off, he won’t just have to fend off attack-ready, amply experienced politicians; he’ll also have to exercise caution over what he himself says. (Basil Fawlty voice: “Don’t mention 9/11!”) Considering how much he styles himself after the famously unfiltered Donald Trump, Ramaswamy likely won’t be able to keep from opening his mouth. The real question, in this Republican contest, is if such absurdity will hurt him or help him.