At last week’s Republican presidential debate, the moderators asked whether Vice President Mike Pence did the right thing in refusing Donald Trump’s demands that he try to overturn Joe Biden’s victory when Congress counted the electoral votes on January 6, 2021. Six of the eight candidates present said Pence did the right thing. A seventh candidate was Pence himself. Vivek Ramaswamy, the remaining candidate onstage, was not directly asked.
It was a potentially difficult question for Ramaswamy, who has recently risen to third place in national polls but has studiously avoided breaking from Trump in any high-profile way. So on Sunday, NBC’s Chuck Todd asked him directly: Did Pence do the right thing?
Ramaswamy offered a response of blithe bullshittery that epitomizes why he’s gained in GOP primary polls lately, why so many of his fellow GOP candidates can’t stand him, and why Democrats view his rise as a sign of the worrying authoritarian drift of the GOP. In other words, his answer had something for everyone.
While not endorsing Trump’s specific claim that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim that Ramaswamy, before launching his campaign, wrote was “weak” and not “grounded in fact” — he nevertheless said that Pence should have somehow forced Democrats to agree to a sweeping national overhaul of election rules as a prerequisite for letting Biden’s win go forward.
On the website formerly known as Twitter, there’s long been a running joke where the tweeter claims “I would simply” do something that is actually extremely difficult. (“If i ever fell in some quicksand i would simply thrash around until i was out. it’s that simple,” was the first version.) Vivek Ramaswamy is the “I would simply …” candidate in the 2024 race. Our nation’s most challenging issues? Well, he’d simply solve them, unlike those other louts.
What Vice President Vivek Ramaswamy supposedly would have done on January 6
Ramaswamy began his…
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