Trump’s Running Mate? It’s Gotta Be Vivek Ramaswamy.

 

OPINION

Trump’s Running Mate? It’s Gotta Be Vivek Ramaswamy.

Feb. 1, 2024

Credit...Ben Hickey

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/opinion/trump-vivek-ramaswamy-vice-president.html

Frank Bruni

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

 

The conventional wisdom has long been that a presidential candidate should pick a running mate who provides some extra vitamins or different flavors. If you’re a rib-eye, you do broccoli. If you’re pralines and cream, you choose cookie dough.

 

But if you’re Donald Trump, that makes no sense whatsoever. You double down, which means you double Donald.

 

Because if you’re Trump, your whole brand — your whole point — is to defy norms and break rules. Everyone else calls Putin a snake in the grass? You declare him the bee’s knees. Everyone else says tomato? You say ketchup.

 

And if you’re Trump, you think — no, you know — that your greatest asset is your supreme, inimitable, undiluted Trumpness, so you want a second serving of that, a force multiplier of it, a walking, talking tribute to, emulation of and genuflection before it.

 

You want Vivek Ramaswamy.

 

After all, you tried the whole rounding-yourself-out thing the first time around, and look what that got you: a white-haired wimp who babbled about the Constitution when his marching orders were a coup. You don’t make the Mike Pence mistake twice.

 

You look for extreme unscrupulousness, peak opportunism. And while the pickings are plentiful in the MAGAverse, where Kari Lake looms and J.D. Vance vamps and Marjorie Taylor God-Help-Us turns paranoia into performance art, not all moral contortionists have the same limberness and not all suck-ups are created equal. Ramaswamy takes the cake. Then he feeds it to Trump baby-bird-style and wipes the glistening corners of the orange emperor’s mouth with a fine linen napkin.

 

I have no idea, really, if Trump is seriously considering Ramaswamy. I have zero ability to get inside Trump’s head and even less desire to. It’s a squalid place.

 

But I know that Ramaswamy is doing one of the most concerted and repellent vice-presidential auditions I’ve seen, and that’s what really rivets me: Ramaswamy as emblem and harbinger of a potentially unprecedented season and spectacle of sycophancy. Ramaswamy as ultimate sellout. Ramaswamy as pure expression of the dark passions that roil the MAGAverse.

 

One of the more bizarre and depressing stories of the week is the MAGA freakout that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are vaccine-loving secret agents of President Biden’s re-election campaign — at least I think I have that right — and who do you suppose positioned himself in the dead center of that delusion?

 

Ramaswamy! “I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl,” he wrote in a social media post on Monday. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”

 

For my part, I wonder how much of what he spouts he really believes, and how much is an attempt to convince Trump and Trump’s minions that he’s loopy and shameless enough to be admitted fully into the fold.

 

After all, he has some penance to do. People forget that. I don’t. Just the other day, for my own perverse amusement, I reacquainted myself with what he was saying as recently as late 2022, upon the release of his book “Nation of Victims,” which lumped Trump and his enablers together with woke progressives as whiners trying to shift responsibility for their woes onto anyone but themselves.

 

Politico published an excerpt, which included Ramaswamy’s assertion that the “worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen.” He added that while 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.”

 

Yes, this is the same Ramaswamy who, in the course of his recent, failed presidential campaign, cast Nikki Haley as the pawn of some globalist cabal; called the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an “inside job”; accused the U.S. government of suppressing essential truths about the Sept. 11 terror attacks; and all in all worked overtime to feed Republicans’ persecution complex.

 

This is the same Ramaswamy who, in a Republican presidential debate in August, called Trump “the best president of the 21st century.” This is the same Ramaswamy now stumping for Trump anywhere and in any way that a fawning surrogate can stump.

 

Like Vance and so many other Republicans, Ramaswamy has gone from looking down on Trump to batting his eyelashes at him, from wagging a finger to doing cartwheels, and he evinces not an iota, not a scintilla, not a glimmer, not a wisp of mortification about that.

 

No, he just stands exultantly beside Trump onstage in New Hampshire, gushing over Trump’s victory in that state’s primary and taking the microphone long enough to tag the people rooting for Haley to remain in the presidential race as “ugly Democratic George Soros juniors.”

 

Oh, how Trump must have loved that bit of nastiness. How he must bask in Ramaswamy’s performative adoration. What a peerless pair of unprincipled peacocks they are. It’s a match made in MAGA heaven.