On this last, slow, hot week in August, we are trapped in a Vivek Ramaswamy news cycle. Ramaswamy has figured out the path to free media is lined with saying extreme things like how “the climate change agenda is a hoax” at last week’s first Republican debate, or more recently, doubling down on calling Rep. Ayanna Pressley a member of the “modern KKK” (CNN’s State of the Union) or suggesting Mike Pence should’ve implemented new voting reforms before certifying the 2020 election (NBC’s Meet the Press). He was still pushing that bizarre January 6 scenario days later on MSNBC.
What’s important about Ramaswamy is not his ideology—he has no coherent one—but how susceptible our political and media ecosystem is to a charismatic phony. He’s become a recurring character on cable news, recently claiming on CNN that he was misquoted in The Atlantic when raising questions about the 9/11 attacks. But The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson had the tape, which of course included Ramaswamy asking, “How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers?” Denying something that is actually on tape, how very Trumpy.
Two days later, at the Fox News–hosted GOP debate, Ramaswamy claimed to be “the only candidate onstage who isn’t bought and paid for” when decrying the climate “hoax.” But it turns out that Ramaswamy is “bought and paid” or at least “paid for” because his investment firm, Strive, has a fund called DRLL, which, as Semafor reports, “invests in US energy companies and urges them to keep drilling for oil so long as it’s profitable.” As Heated’s Emily Atkin put it, “Ramaswamy makes money from climate denial.”
And yet, in the past, Ramaswamy has acknowledged that climate change is “real,” just one of his campaign flip-flops. On recognizing Juneteenth, for instance, he went from supportive—“Let it be a celebration of the American Dream itself,” he said on video—to against the holiday just two months later, telling Iowa voters,“Cancel Juneteenth or one of the other useless ones we made up.”
Obviously, the outrage-to-free-media pipeline was something Donald Trump took advantage of in 2016 to the tune of $2 billion. Ramaswamy has managed to once again exploit this media weakness, making incendiary or contradictory claims on one show or stage, only to be asked about them on another. But worse than that, it seems clear from his polling that Republican voters are way more fixated on personality over policy and seem to long for another smooth-talking showman.
Perhaps we shouldn’t find this surprising, as Fantasyland author Kurt Andersen put it in an email, “Americans historically have a special weakness for charismatic charlatans especially in religion—from Joseph Smith two centuries ago to the past half century of televangelists. Now that we have a political party dominated by quasi-religious and actually religious charlatanism, voilà.”
In Vivekmentum we see that Trumpism (or the con that is Trumpism) can in fact scale. Stuart Stevens, a former GOP operative who is firmly in the Never Trump camp, told me on the phone, “The party has become less educated and with that comes a higher susceptibility to conspiracy, fraud, and snake oil salesman.”
It’s easy to see Ramaswamy as an heir to Trumpism—at least according to Trump. “He’s a very, very, very intelligent person,” Trump told Glenn Beck, when asked about the idea of becoming his VP. “He’s got good energy,” he said, adding: “I tell you, I think he’d be very good.”
I always believed that Trump was appealing because he was not bound by the truth and could promise things that were completely undeliverable. This is my answer to the very annoying discourse of “Why people voted for Trump.” In a speech in North Carolina, in 2020, Trump told the audience, “Under the America First Healthcare Plan, we will ensure the highest standard of care anywhere in the world, cutting-edge treatments, state-of-the-art medicine, groundbreaking cures, and true health security for you and your loved ones. And we will do it rapidly, and it’s in very good order, and some of it has already been implemented.” Trump was paradoxically promising something that he said he’d already delivered.
Of course, promising a health care overhaul that never materializes is a Trump mainstay, just like declaring over and over that Mexico is paying for a border wall. Yet, as John Harwood wrote in 2019, “Trump’s ‘great wall’ is a fantasy that even he knows will never be real.”
I remember watching one of those painful debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and realizing that a conventional politician with normal political embellishments couldn’t compete with pure unadulterated fabulism, a kind of brazen lying that Trump seemingly patented. We know politicians lie; we’ve grown to expect it. But Trump lied on the kind of scale that the American people couldn’t process. He’d lie about serious matters down to nonsensical, provably untrue things, from the weather during his inauguration to how the noise from windmills causes cancer. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false and misleading claims over his presidency, reaching new heights of dishonesty that has helped tip his party, and its supporters, into unreality.
Since 2015, we’ve gone through a pandemic, cultural reckonings, a supply chain crunch, a tight labor market, inflation, and other destabilizing events. During this time, Trump’s base has gotten smaller but it’s also hardened into something of which there is no historical precedence. This Republican base now occupies a kind of Earth-Two space, in which they still believe Trump won the 2020 election. “Among registered voters who say they cast a ballot for Trump in 2020, 75% say they have doubts about [Joe] Biden’s legitimacy,” CNN found in a recent poll. Other polling this month found that “more Trump voters trust him than trust their own friends and family, conservative media, or even religious leaders.”
If Trump does somehow win the electoral college, we could see him completely dismantle the federal government—the Heritage Foundation is already workshopping the idea—or even end democracy as we know it. But perhaps even scarier than another Trump term—and that’s already terrifying—is the possibility that someone theoretically worse, like a competent Trump or a charismatic Ron DeSantis, comes along and claims this MAGA base, already tipped into unreality and primed for a prophet. Such a person could do more damage than we can imagine.