Emulating Trump, Ramaswamy shows a penchant for dispensing with the facts

In his breakout performance in the Republican primary race, Vivek Ramaswamy has harnessed his populist bravado while frequently and unapologetically contorting the truth for political gain, much in the same way that former President Donald Trump has mastered.

Ramaswamy’s pattern of falsehoods has been the subject of intensifying scrutiny by the news media and, more recently, his GOP opponents, who clashed with him often during the party’s first debate last Wednesday.

There are layers to Ramaswamy’s distortions: He has spread lies and exaggerations on subjects including the 2020 election results, the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol and climate change. When challenged on those statements, Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who is the first millennial Republican to run for president, has in several instances claimed that he had never made them or that he had been taken out of context.

But his denials have repeatedly been refuted by recordings and transcripts from Ramaswamy’s interviews — or, in some cases, excerpts from his own book.

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A misleading anecdote

At a breakfast roundtable event organized by his campaign Friday in Indianola, Iowa, Ramaswamy recounted how he had visited the South Side of Chicago in May to promote his immigration proposals to a mostly Black audience.

He boasted that nowhere had his ideas on the issue been more enthusiastically received than in the nation’s third most populous city, where his appearance had followed community protests over the housing of migrants in a local high school.

“I have never been in a room more in favor of my proposal to use the U.S. military to secure the southern border and seal the Swiss cheese down there than when I was in a nearly all-Black room of supposedly mostly Democrats on the South Side of Chicago,” he said.

But Ramaswamy’s retelling of the anecdote was sharply contradicted by the observations of a New York Times reporter who covered both events.

The reporter witnessed the audience in Chicago pepper Ramaswamy about reparations, systemic racism and his opposition to affirmative action. Immigration was barely mentioned during the formal program. It was so absent that a Ramaswamy campaign aide at one point pleaded for questions on the issue. With that prompting, a single Republican consultant stood up to question Ramaswamy on his proposals.

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Trump criticism

In one of the more heated exchanges of last week’s GOP debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey criticized Ramaswamy for lionizing Trump and defending his actions during the Jan. 6 attack.

He sought to cast Ramaswamy as an opportunist who was trying to pander to Trump’s supporters by attributing the riot to government censorship during the 2020 election.

“In your book, you had much different things to say about Donald Trump than you’re saying here tonight,” Christie said.

Ramaswamy bristled and said, “That’s not true.”

But in his 2022 book “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” Ramaswamy had harsh words for Trump and gave a more somber assessment of the violence.

“It was a dark day for democracy,” Ramaswamy wrote. “The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”

When asked by the Times about the excerpt, Ramaswamy insisted that his rhetoric had not evolved and pointed out that he had co-written an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal five days after the Jan. 6 attack that was critical of the actions of social media companies during the 2020 election.

“Also what I said at the time was that I really thought what Trump did was regrettable,” he said. “I would have handled it very differently if I was in his shoes. I will remind you that I am running for U.S. president in the same race that Donald Trump is running right now.”

Ramaswamy parsed his criticism of the former president, however.

“But a bad judgment is not the same thing as a crime,” he said.

By blunting his message about the former president’s accountability and casting himself as an outsider, Ramaswamy appears to be making a play for Trump’s base.

© 2023 The New York Times Company