27 August 2023 — 1527 mdt
Two disturbing moments defined
the 23 August Republican debate
By James Conner
Eight Republican presidential candidates, and the conspicuous absence of front runner Donald Trump, gathered in Milwaukee Wedensday for a two-hour debate sponsored and conducted by Fox News. I watched all be the last 15 minutes and would have watched those minutes had not Fox’s live stream suddenly terminated, as it had several times during the event.
But I saw enough.
According to small sample quick post debate polls, the performances of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose raging bull delivery would have made a pro wrestler proud, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old pharmaceutical billionaire without any public service on his résumé, were liked best by Republican primary voters. And, as Morning Consult, discovered, Trump is ahead of both men by miles.
Morning Consult, 24 August, 1,256 likely voters. Approximate MOE: 3 percent.
Two moments stood out for me: (1) when the candidates were asked whether they would support trump were he convicted (presumably of a serious felony, not of a pissant traffic offense) in a court of law, and six said “Yes,”(2) Pence’s, Christie’s, and Haley’s pushback against DeSantis and Ramaswamy when they sided with Vladimir Putin on a settlement ending the war in Ukraine (which Putin started).
Here, courtesy of Rev.com, is the exchange on supporting a convicted felon:
Bret Baier (01:12:05):
You all signed a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee. If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice? Please raise your hand if you would. Hold on. So just to be clear, Governor Christie, you were kind of late to the game there, but you raised your hand.
Chris Christie (01:12:35):
No, I’m doing this. Look, I’m doing this, not this.
Bret Baier (01:12:38):
I know you didn’t.
Chris Christie (01:12:43):
Look, here’s the bottom line. Someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct. Okay? Now whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of President of the United States. This is the great thing about this country. Booing is allowed, but it doesn’t change the truth. It doesn’t change the truth.
Bret Baier (01:13:27):
Mr. Ramaswamy, you raised your hand supporting …
Vivek Ramaswamy (01:13:29):
I’d like to get in and respond. Let’s just speak the truth. Okay? President Trump, I believe, was the best president of the 21st century. It’s a fact and Chris Christie, honest to God, your claim that Donald Trump is motivated by vengeance and grievance would be a lot more credible if your entire campaign were not based on vengeance and grievance against one man. If people at home want to see a bunch of people blindly bashing Donald Trump without an iota of vision for this country, they could just change the channel to MSNBC right now. But I’m not running for president of MSNBC. I am running for President of the United States. We’re skating on thin ice and we cannot set a precedent where the party in power uses police force to indict its political opponents. It is wrong. We have to end the weaponization of justice in this country.
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall’s reaction to Ramaswamy was identical to mine, and is worth quoting extensively.
Instapolls and betting markets says it was a big win for Vivek Ramaswamy who as I put it last night “comes off as a cocky little shit” and thus will “probably be rising in the polls.” For a good rundown of what happened you can listen to Kate Riga and my overnight insta-pod, in which we provided our initial reactions.
But if our metric is the 2024 presidential race and who will be the GOP nominee, the most important thing to remember is that the entire exercise was meaningless. Donald Trump will be the nominee. The most fascinating thing about last night’s spectacle — if you step back from the immediate fisticuffs — is the sight of the Republican Party so totally enmeshed in Donald Trump that even those candidates who really think they’re trying to defeat Trump are chained to the belief in the strategic necessity of defending him. They are vaguely reminiscent of the small number of legal alternative parties in the old Soviet Union (China has a similar setup today) which were allowed to exist mostly to the extent they chiefly talked about how awesome the Communist Party was.
If there was a revelation last night, at least to me, it’s that I believe there’s a very good chance Trump will choose Vivek Ramaswamy as his running mate.
People frequently speculate that Kari Lake or another Trump super fan will get the nod. But I doubt it. Even for big time Trump and Big Lie supporters Lake, I believe, has become kind of a joke.
Ramaswamy captures the aggression and transgression of Trump without at all clearly copying him. He’s also managed to break through, and not as a one-dimensional Trump defender, while checking every key box for Trump. He matches him on every policy goal, such as they are. He is basically alone in promising to pardon Trump for any crime he gets convicted of on Day One. He threw out the needless and actually quite silly line that Trump was the greatest president of the 21st century. (Since presumably Democrats — Biden and Obama — aren’t in the running this equals saying that Trump was better than George W. Bush.) But I’m sure it sounded great to Trump.
Trump would like a younger, non-white veep candidate with a ton of energy, who matched and exceeded him on aggression and served as his attack dog during the campaign. In those American carnage moments, reclaiming our “identity,” he has Trump’s darkness. He also has the one seal of validation Trump’s always respected: money.
Ramaswamy, according to the Guardian, has deep connections with insiders on the far right and, to a limited, extent, on the middle to left.
Amid speculation that Ramaswamy might end up Trump’s running mate, Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, called Ramaswamy “a classic 2020s America tech bro bullshit artist … Trump for the 21st century”.
Ramaswamy’s claim to be an outsider, Galen said, was part of his “fundamental understanding … that Maga [the pro-Trump Republican base] wants him to show that the rest of these people [in the primary] are politicians. He’s willing to be the showman … the outsider. Anti-establishment. ‘If anything is there, I dislike it because it’s there.’ You know, ‘I’m going to have fun with this. I’m not going to take it seriously because you’re a bunch of hacks and goons.’”
But in another sense, regarding Ramaswamy’s ties to the likes of Leo and Thiel, Galen said: “I think that he’s an insider.
“He walks into a room with Leonard Leo and says, ‘What do you need me to do?’ … And they’re like, ‘Here’s what we want you to do. Here’s what we need you to do.’ Right?
“Do I think [Ramaswamy] cares about [issues like restricting] abortion? No, not particularly. I don’t think he has a firmly held belief on it. But if he thinks that it will help him, and in exchange for that Leonard Leo will throw a little chicken feed of the $1.6bn that old man gave him, to help him? Sure, what the hell?
“He didn’t ever think he’d get this far. So now he’s just gonna push it as far as he can.”
Ramaswamy, Galen said, was closely tied to a world of donors and non-profits in which Leo is “certainly at the center. And this movement only moves in one direction, and it’s toward the darkness. It’s towards authoritarianism. And it’s because it finds people like Ramaswamy. And the more that all these other candidates will now attack him, they will drive him further and further into the arms of those people.”
General George B. McClellan, was 38 when he ran for president as the Democratic nominee in 1864. He lost to Abe Lincoln. Since then, no one under 40 has been nominated for president by the Republican or Democratic Parties. In 1940, 38-year-old Tom Dewey, then a brash crusading prosecutor, sought the GOP nomination, which was won by Wendell Wilkie. Four years later, now governor of New York, he won the nomination but lost to Franklin Roosevelt. Dewey gave it another try in 1948, but lost to Harry S. Truman.
But Republicans do nominate young men for vice president. Theodore Roosevelt was 42 when nominated for vice president in 1900. Richard Nixon was 39 when he became Eisenhower’s running mate (Dewey reportedly urged Ike to choose Tricky Dick). Dan Quayle was 41 when he became George H.W. Bush’s vice president. At 44, Al Gore became Democrat Bill Clinton’s vice president. John F. Kennedy was 43 when he became president. All but New York governor Roosevelt were U.S. Senators.
Ramaswamy has no pedigree of public service. He has money, unbridled ambition, and a sociopath’s willingness to say anything to get his way. He’s a character out of an Ayn Rand novel, a young Trump. That’s why Trump’s base likes him.
The other disquieting moment occurred when DeSantis and Ramaswamy rejected full blown support for Ukraine’s effort to repel and expel the Russian invasion of their homeland. DeSantis and Ramaswamy would end the conflict by letting Putin annex large areas of Ukraine, a land for peace deal likely to last only as long as Putin needs to rebuilt his army to restart the war and try to grab more land. Mike Pence rightly warned that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, a NATO nation will be Putin’s next target — and that would require sending American soldiers to Europe to fight Russian soldiers. Better, said Pence, to let Ukraine be the front line. Christie and Haley joined Pence in vigorously refuting the appeasement proposals and America can be an island cut off from the world philosophy of DeSantis and Ramaswamy.
There will be another debate in September, with stricter qualification criteria and presumably fewer candidate on stage. It is possible that debate will exclude the only candidates — Doug Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson — who refused to raise their hands when asked if they would support Trump were he convicted of a crime.
Trump is on his way to winning the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. If he beats Biden, he will become our last president and first king — and our democracy will be royally screwed.