This is the last Jim-written Morning Jolt until August 15. On the menu today: We close the week with a look at some recent statements by Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s arguably the current king of the also-rans, well behind Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, but a few percentage points ahead of the Nikki Haleys, Tim Scotts, and Chris Christies of the world. Ramaswamy contended that Taiwan could be protected, and war prevented, by putting an AR-15 in the hands of every Taiwanese family. He also said, when asked about the 9/11 attacks, “I don’t believe the government has told us the truth. Again, I’m driven by evidence and data. What I’ve seen in the last several years is we have to be skeptical of what the government does tell us.” I haven’t taken Ramaswamy all that seriously this year, and he appears to be hell-bent on vindicating my skepticism. But then again, what if this is what Republican primary voters want to hear?
Telling the Voters What They Want to Hear
A few weeks ago, I was discussing the 2024 Republican primary with someone I respect a great deal, and this person told me something along the lines of, “Don’t sleep on Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s the real deal.” My view on Ramaswamy had been along the lines of Charlie Cooke’s. The 37-year-old Ramaswamy struck me as a man who’s running for the 8 p.m. prime-time slot on Fox News, not the presidency.
For example, back in June, Ramaswamy said in a speech in Iowa and then tweeted out to the world, “Here’s how we protect Taiwan without going to war with China: open a branch of the NRA in Taiwan, put an AR-15 in the hands of every family, and train them how to use it. That’ll give Xi Jinping a taste of American exceptionalism.”
Widespread Taiwanese gun ownership would no doubt give an invading Chinese army a new complication to think about, but it strikes me as very far from sufficient to deter a Chinese invasion. This proposal is a formula for getting lightly armed Taiwanese citizens, with varying degrees of training and ability, into gunfights with a heavily armed, extensively trained Chinese invasion force that is likely to be wearing body armor and perhaps using body shields designed to withstand armor-piercing munitions. Those invading Chinese forces would also presumably have armored vehicles, tanks, air support, support from their Navy, etc. Again, if my country were being invaded, I’d definitely prefer my country’s population to be armed as opposed to unarmed. But I also wouldn’t want to place a bet that AR-15s in households would be sufficient. The Ukrainians had about 2 million registered and an estimated 3-5 million unregistered firearms before the Russian invasion. The Taiwanese government is not showing any enthusiasm for Ramaswamy’s proposal, either.
Ramaswamy’s proposal was glib and exciting, evoking images of Red Dawn for the Taiwanese . . . and yet anyone who has spent even a little bit of time looking at the issue will recognize it is utterly insufficient as an actual American national-security policy. If Ramaswamy uses it on the debate stage, it will probably get a lot of applause. Make the same proposal to the Pentagon, whoever makes up a Ramaswamy administration National Security Council, and the Taiwanese government, and they’ll probably stare back in exasperated incredulity.
But this person I respect a great deal had interacted with Ramaswamy a bit and insisted he was smart, and that he was being underestimated.
Earlier this week, Ramaswamy appeared on Alex Stein’s program on The Blaze, and had this exchange:
Stein: Was 9/11 an inside job or exactly how the government tells us?
Ramaswamy: I don’t believe the government has told us the truth. Again, I’m driven by evidence and data. What I’ve seen in the last several years is we have to be skeptical of what the government does tell us. I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary, Do I believe everything the government told us about it? Absolutely not—
[crosstalk]
Ramaswamy: The 9/11 commission, absolutely not.
(Note that Stein’s previous question was whether the moon landing was real or faked; Ramaswamy said, “I have no evidence to suggest it was faked, so I’m going to submit that it was real.”)
Ramaswamy backtracked and clarified a bit later on, elaborating, “Do I believe our government has been completely forthright about 9/11? No. Al-Qaeda clearly planned and executed the attacks, but we have never fully addressed who knew what in the Saudi government about it. We *can* handle the TRUTH.”
The redacted section of the 9/11 Commission report was declassified and released in 2016. Those pages included the conclusion, “While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi Government,” and cited information “indicating that Saudi Government officials in the United States may have other ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups,” but the commission acknowledged that much of the information “remains speculative and yet to be independently verified.”
Then, in September 2021, President Biden declassified portions of a 16-page FBI report tying 9/11 hijackers to Saudi nationals living in the United States, “a closer relationship than had been previously known between two Saudis in particular — including one with diplomatic status — and some of the hijackers.”
(At some point, the belief that the U.S. government is protecting the Saudi Arabian government by covering up its ties to al-Qaeda clashes with former president Trump’s very close relationship with the Saudi Arabian government, both as president and as a businessman, and Joe Biden’s largely failed effort to make Saudi Arabia “pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.” It’s almost as if most people’s perspectives on the character of Saudi rulers are completely dependent upon their political needs of that moment.)
Now, we know darn well what Ramaswamy did in that Blaze interview. He didn’t fully embrace 9/11 Truther theories . . . but he didn’t explicitly reject or denounce them either. His initial statements, “I don’t believe the government has told us the truth” and “we have to be skeptical of what the government does tell us” are what a 9/11 Truther wants to hear. It was only later on, on Twitter, that Ramaswamy declared, “Al-Qaeda clearly planned and executed the attacks.”
I suppose you could look at this two-step and conclude it was clever. Or you could conclude that the stink of 9/11 Truther-ism will repel more voters than it will ever attract and wonder why an allegedly serious and smart presidential candidate would touch that perspective with a ten-foot pole.
Either Ramaswamy is smart and feels a need to sound stupid to win the GOP nomination, or he is not nearly as smart as my friend believes.
That first option is actually more troubling. Republican candidates know that there are Republican primary voters out there who don’t listen to Alex Jones, right?
I’m not outraged about Ron DeSantis’s recent declaration at a New Hampshire barbecue, “On bureaucracy, you know, we’re going to have all these deep-state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on Day One and be ready to go.” The country’s political discussions are filled to the brim with hyperbolic language — everyone does it a million times a day. (See what I did there?) But apparently DeSantis had said last week that his Defense secretary might have to “slit some throats” while discussing changes he’d make at the Pentagon as president. So this doesn’t appear to be a one-off; the repeated use of the term indicates a deliberate messaging effort. Apparently, when we think of DeSantis, we’re supposed to envision a pirate climbing aboard, cutlass gripped between his teeth. Probably a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.
Campaigns seem to have this adamant belief that GOP primary voters eat this sort of rhetoric up, and that any argument must be articulated in a style that is a cross between a professional wrestler, an ancient barbarian warlord, and Doctor Doom. Apparently, GOP presidential-campaign consultants are telling their clients that voters’ eyes will glaze over if they say that during the pandemic, “$200 billion, or 17 percent of the $1.2 trillion in Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan funds, may have been stolen due to fraud.”
Or that the U.S Government Accountability Office recently determined that there are at least 100 areas where the federal government could eliminate duplicate and overlapping programs, consolidate them, and save about $600 billion. Or that in the last three years, the U.S. Postal Service changed 125,000 temporary employees to full-time employees, making those jobs more difficult to eliminate.
Verifiable facts, numbers, specifics, cited sources — to some of us, these are what makes an argument compelling and persuasive. The truth is bad enough; you don’t have to overdramatize it or make the effort to cut government bureaucracy sound like an action movie. (Obviously, it’s an office comedy.) The effort to make political arguments more exciting, vivid, and fun to hear and watch also dumbs them down and ignores trade-offs and costs and potential complications. And then everyone wonders why elected officials don’t keep their promises.
To come full circle, if the U.S. government really wants to ensure Taiwan is never invaded by China, it’s going to require hard work and lasting changes. For a really in-depth look, I’d recommend the December 20, 2021, issue of National Review. But the short version is: We’re going to have to sell the Taiwanese government effective weapons systems, expand our navy instead of shrinking it, have a consistent and sizable naval presence in that region, and develop countermeasures for Chinese attacks in cyberspace and in space. Oh, and on top of that, we obviously want to develop our intelligence services’ ability to penetrate the Chinese government as much as possible.
Some prefer big-ticket arms transfers — jet fighters, long-range missiles, frigates, and submarines — others prefer the “porcupine strategy” of huge stockpiles of smaller systems such as anti-ship and anti-air missiles, patrol boats, and mines. But either way, to truly convince Xi Jinping or his successor that a Chinese invasion would cost Beijing too much in blood and treasure, Taiwan must be a lot more armed and a lot more prepared than it is right now.
Opening up an NRA branch office in Taipei just isn’t going to cut it.
But do the people who will vote in next year’s Republican presidential primary want to hear that?
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, a new CNN poll offers further evidence that Americans continue to feel squeezed by high prices, don’t feel like the problem of inflation is solved, feel pessimistic about the economy, and feel that President Biden is doing a lousy job. Americans are basically begging the Republican Party for a better option.