The internet is like a graveyard of words, where every post, comment, and apparently even every commentary piece can come back to haunt you, as GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is finding out.
Ramaswamy has been seen as the underdog, steadily rising in the polls. A few months ago, he was a virtual unknown in the political world, but recent polls show the businessman virtually neck and neck with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for second place behind former President Donald Trump, according to the New York Post.
Ramaswamy has been positioning himself as Trump 2.0, a political outsider. He has also been very vocal in support of Trump, writing in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that, “Donald Trump isn’t the cause of what happened on Jan 6. The real cause was systematic & pervasive censorship of citizens in the year leading up to it.”
https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1686501815347556352?
But a resurfaced commentary written by the presidential hopeful and published by Politico in 2022 is raising questions about the authenticity of Ramaswamy’s support for Trump, and some social media users are sounding off.
https://twitter.com/LegendaryEnergy/status/1687672983530438657?
https://twitter.com/shadygrooove/status/1687994310313353216?
https://twitter.com/Samthe34041833/status/1687808409049911296?
In the article, which was adapted from Ramaswamy’s book “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” Ramaswamy compares Trump to former George gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, alleging that they both engaged in a victimhood narrative by claiming that their elections were stolen.
According to Ramaswamy, Trump’s refusal to accept the election results and his pursuit of legal challenges did not yield significant evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities.
“While Donald Trump promised to lead the nation to recommit itself to the pursuit of greatness, what he delivered, in the end, was just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole,” Ramaswamy wrote.
“Trump took a page from the Abrams playbook. His claims were just as weak as Abrams’. She claimed voter suppression in her 2018 defeat, he claimed voter fraud two years later. He filed scores of lawsuits over various claims of fraud, as was his right, but they came nowhere close to changing the outcome in a single state, let alone the several swing states whose results he needed to overturn,” Ramaswamy continued.
“It’s easy to be a sore loser; it’s harder to figure out how to win,” Ramaswamy added in the final paragraph.
“The comforting blanket of stolen-election stories allows those who embrace them to avoid self-examination and introspection and place all their electoral shortcomings at the feet of others. This is how the woke left wins — not with a bang, but with a whimper. Not by winning a battle of arguments with the other side, but by getting the other side to adopt its own values and methods without even realizing it, even as they continue to battle one another.”
Well, either Ramaswamy had a road-to-Damascus conversion or the support for Trump he has been displaying is political posturing.
Is it a flip-flop or a calculated decision?
Was he finally convinced of the justness of Trump’s legal challenges, or is he just a vulture waiting to swoop in after the wolves have devoured the lion?
I’m always willing to believe that people can change their minds.
But when they’re playing a high-stakes game for the highest office in the land, it’s better to lean a little less on the “trust” and a little more on the “verify.”
via westernjournal