As Hamlet said when he dismissed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from his conscience, Vivek Ramaswamy ‘did make love to his employment.’
The verdict on Vivek Ramaswamy’s candidacy for president is in! From Donald Trump, that is. Over the weekend, Trump saw fit to comment spontaneously on the campaign to date of the 2024 Republican presidential primary’s most inexplicable entrant, Ramaswamy — a Wall Street investor turned anti-woke public speaker who, as my colleague Charlie Cooke has pointed out, is not really running for president at all. He is running for his bank account, his “brand,” a cabinet position on Earth 2, and maybe a new stablecoin he’ll be unveiling to his mailing list a year from now after the crypto market settles down.
Anyway, Trump doesn’t seem to know who the hell this guy is either, and clearly can’t be bothered to learn — this is one of the few things I legitimately respect about Trump — but he does know one thing: This guy Vivek really loves sucking up to Donald Trump. And that can’t help but be good for Donald Trump. But just in case this character forgets to remember who he actually is, Trump helpfully stepped in to remind him. I want to post the screencap here, because honestly it just reads far better with the “Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America” preceding it, the way you’d issue a press release under your formal job description to announce your opinion of the band KISS:
One can only wonder what it must feel like to run for President after having been announced as another candidate’s publicly kept man. (I imagine Ramaswamy weakly quavering “thanks, Don . . .” to him on the phone.) It is an endeavor for the shameless, and logic dictates that it makes sense only if there is a perceptible gain on the other end (nota bene, dear readers: Vivek Ramaswamy is not “running to save this country”).
There is a semi-serious insight to be discerned behind my mockery: Ramaswamy is performing reasonably well (although not notably so) in some recent polls because there is a real market out there for people who hammer on the same political points as Trump — and seek to make the same cultural enemies — without carrying any of his personal, historical, political, or legal baggage. Ramaswamy certainly fits all of that, although he adds a vast comparative charisma deficit and an unshakeable air of “who are you and why are you here and why are you running again?” (Call it the “Asa Hutchinson Effect.”)
That said, since I have little but contempt for Ramaswamy’s “man in a hurry” grifting bit (having lived through it so many times before) I will instead grudgingly tip my cap to Donald Trump for a devastatingly effective act of bringing Ramaswamy to heel like a whipped dog. He knows his business when it comes to wrestling with those who try to play by his own pre-set rules and is truly shameless at delivering public humiliation. This press release was a transparently obvious dominance play, all the more effective for the fact that Trump couched it in the form of a backhanded compliment: “Thank you for using your candidate platform to mostly talk about why voters should support me instead of you.” It would be unfair, were it not for the fact that this is more or less what Ramaswamy has been doing, right on down to miming Trump’s attacks on other candidates.
So my pity is distinctly limited. As Hamlet said when he dismissed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from his conscience, Vivek Ramaswamy “did make love to his employment.” He chose to abase himself like this — court flatterers can sometimes gain cheap titles of nobility; they never gain the throne — so it should surprise neither him nor anyone else that Donald Trump has rewarded his fawning servility with the slave’s brand he openly sought.