Vivek Ramaswamy Emerges as the Republican Pete Buttigieg, in That the Other Candidates Hate Him

On Wednesday night in Milwaukee, eight Republicans trailing Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential primary gathered for the cycle’s first debate and, with a clear and united voice, denounced one man: Vivek Ramaswamy.

You read that right. With Trump running away with the race and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis behind him in a clear (if tenuous) second, it was somehow the 38-year-old Ramaswamy who took the most direct hits. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s was likely the most memorable: After two of Ramaswamy’s high-energy, relentlessly loquacious answers, Christie described him as “a guy who sounds like ChatGPT.” Former Vice President Mike Pence made a glaringly condescending reference to Ramaswamy “learning on the job,” to which the crowd responded with a deserved oooooh. The super PAC that supports DeSantis called Ramaswamy a fraud on Twitter, and you can see former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s opinion of him expressed nonverbally above. (“You have talked down everyone on this stage,” Haley told Ramaswamy later, during a segment about Ukraine. “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.”)

The animosity makes some sense, strategically. Nothing any of the other candidates say about Trump seems to have any effect on his popularity with Republican voters. If he doesn’t crater, he wins, so why bother attacking him like some Democrat would? But if he does somehow leave the race (or, you know, the country) because of his criminal trials, second place is the place to be. And Ramaswamy’s momentum might have him headed there. Or at least it did before the debate.

It’s easy to see why. Ramaswamy is comfortable in front of a crowd and on television; although he’s got a background in biotech, the main reason anyone had heard of him before he announced he was running for president was his self-invented role as an anti-woke media personality. (The resemblance to celebrated fast-talker and right-wing media luminary Ben Shapiro is strong.) He can “win” this primary just by becoming more famous, which means he can say provocative red-meat stuff like “the climate change agenda is a hoax” without worrying about how general-election voters might perceive it (badly, apparently). While the other candidates are (quite visibly) burdened by the pressure to get out their carefully rehearsed “talking points” and would-be sound-bite zingers without committing an iconic viral gaffe, Ramaswamy has to worry only about being entertaining.

Which is why it’s also easy to see why every other candidate onstage despises him. Like wunderkind Democrat Pete Buttigieg in 2024, Ramaswamy has short-circuited the route to political viability simply by being good at talking. In a field in which multiple candidates had to debase themselves to the point of pretending to enjoy working for Donald Trump, Ramaswamy stands out for having not paid any dues at all. His purported innermost beliefs, like theirs, are carefully calibrated to meet the political moment—his tilt more MAGA nationalist than GOP orthodox, which makes sense in that he needs podcast buzz more than donor support—but unlike them, he has not spent decades of his life having to attend pancake breakfasts in East Shitsville County while accumulating positions that are inconvenient to his current ambition. Like Mayor Pete’s dues-paying competitors in 2020, particularly Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, they find this really annoying.

If there’s any solace for Ramaswamy’s detractors, it’s that, like Mayor Pete, he will almost certainly not win his race; he’s just coming from too far behind as a matter of name recognition and voter trust. But he can emerge from a losing campaign with his stock on the way up, and most of them cannot. And if Wednesday’s debate is any indication, that is not something they are going to forgive him for.