Live from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Thursday morning on The Jay Weber Show – weekdays on News/Talk 1130 WISN, guest host Matt Kittle, National Political Editor of The Star News Network, welcomed Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy to the show to discuss why he’s running and how he plans to move the America First movement further.
Kittle: But now it’s my pleasure to welcome a gentleman who has been billed by many of the pundits, the so-called mainstream media, and the corporate media as a long-shot candidate, but Ohio entrepreneur and political outsider Vivek Ramaswamy certainly isn’t running like a long shot candidate. He joins us now on the Jay Weber Show with Matt Kittle. Good morning, sir! How are you?
Ramaswamy: Good morning, Matt. How are you doing?
Kittle: I am excellent, and I know you’re busy. I was just telling our listeners that I cover the parade of presidential contenders. You have basically put up a tent in Iowa, and it has become your second home, New Hampshire as well.
Ramaswamy: That’s right.
Kittle: And I want to start there because I know you, you get asked this question all the time, even though since you launched in February, you’ve gotten a great deal of name recognition. You’ve got a lot of money in your campaign, a lot of it is funded by you. It seems how much you believe in this cause. And you have been making some headlines, and as I say, you don’t seem to be running as a long shot. Do you consider yourself a long shot in this race?
Ramaswamy: I don’t. I think that we’re going to be the main candidate left at the end of this, but I, it’s going to be a long path to get there, and that’s why it’s a long process, and it’s going to involve, frankly, the importance of early states like Iowa.
That is why I am now an evangelist for first-in-the-nation status because I couldn’t do this if it was just all states voting at the same time, voting for candidates based on what you see on two-dimensional television and two-dimensional digital ads.
This has to be a process where the people of this country, particularly Iowa and New Hampshire, get to know candidates in 3D to really see who’s for real and who’s not. And I think that works to our advantage in that. The time I’ve had in the state, I think, has been really useful with live audiences, live actual crowds which have been flatteringly bigger than I expected this early in the race.
But more importantly, even the one-on-one conversations that we have with people afterward is A, what I’ve enjoyed a lot about this process, but B, I think is going to be a competitive advantage for us. And Matt, I’ll also tell you the metrics are interesting.
We started at 0.0 percent. I’m now at fourth or fifth in most of the national polls as recently as this week, and we’re just two months into this. So we’re actually rising a lot faster than many people, even people on my team we’re planning for. And I think that’s going to be a good thing. We’ll be in third, I think, by this fall. And then, by the time we show up at the Iowa caucuses, I think that we’ll be playing for the win.
Kittle: What’s your path? I know that you have talked about this of late; as a matter of fact, there, there was a piece, and you’ll find that, of course, at The Star News Network, a story about your campaign, talking about your path to victory and obviously, you’ve got the elephant in the room.
The elephant in the room is Donald Trump, who is polling at significantly high rates over his closest competitors. But as you say, I’ve been watching the polling. You have been rising. What is your lane here? How do you come out on top against someone as well-known as Donald Trump, the former president?
Ramaswamy: Similar to the way Donald Trump did it in 2015 when Jeb Bush was in the position that he’s in now. You get to be an outsider once. I’m polling now at or a little bit maybe ahead of where Donald Trump was when he came down the escalator in June of 2015. And I’m the outsider in this race. I’ve got fresh legs. I’m 37 years old, and the first-ever millennial to run for U.S. president as a Republican. And I’m looking to take Trump’s America First agenda.
I will give him credit for that. I’m looking to take that America First agenda to the next level because, unlike the other candidates, you’re asking about the path the other candidates are piecing together. How do we avoid the Trump base? How do we avoid the MAGA base and then piece together a path to 30 or 40 percent? I view it differently.
The Trump base, the MAGA base, the America First base, I was and am part of it, that is my base, actually too. And one of the things we’re saying is who’s actually going to take this to the next level? And I think America First, Matt, does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to me. It belongs to the people who are listening to this right now. It belongs to the people of this country.
And so the question is, who’s going to take that even further? It’s not like I’m saying I’m Trump without the drama. I think that’s Ron DeSantis’s pitch. I think it’s that I’m going further than Trump ever did because I’m taking on affirmative action, which the U.S. President can literally end with an executive order because it started by executive order. I pushed Trump’s people on why they didn’t do it.
They said it was a political hill they didn’t want to die on. I’m unafraid of that. The climate agenda is completely an executive order ending all measurements of carbon emissions by the federal government. It is nonsense, and we need to end it, not just build the wall, use a military, our military, if we can use it to secure somebody else’s border halfway around the world, we can use that military to secure our own border, and I will do it as president.
I won’t just put Betsy DeVoss, who’s a nice person on top of the Department of Education to reform it. That doesn’t work because we still have the beast that lives on. I will shut down the U.S. Department of Education, and so in many ways, I am going further than Trump ever did with that America First agenda.
But I think we’ll be able to do it because I’m doing it on first principles and moral authority, not just vengeance and grievance. And that allows us to go, as Reagan did in 1980, much further with the agenda and lead this nation out of a national identity crisis. And I’m far from ignoring the Trump base that is my base, and we’re bringing them along with us.
Kittle: You bring up a very interesting point, and I think it is an extremely interesting point, given the week’s events. We have an octogenarian president who, as we find out, has CliffsNotes to figure out who he has to interview or who is going to ask the first question in the Press Corps. This is a guy, in President Joe Biden, a lot of Americans, not just Republicans, but Democrats are concerned.
Seventy percent of Americans don’t want this guy running. You have a crowded field on the Republican side and the Democrat side of older Americans, senior citizens, and ARP card-carrying senior citizens. You are a millennial. Does that help your argument in saying there’s clearly a different choice here, and does that help you reach out to people who are concerned about older candidates?
Ramaswamy: I think it does. I’m not one of these people who says, just because you’re old, you’re not the right person for the job. I actually reject that. But the question is, what vitality do you bring to the table? And Joe Biden is a hollowed-out husk of a leader. That’s the problem. I know people who are older than Joe Biden who have greater mental acuity than people my age. That happens.
And so I’m not one of these people who likes to paint with a broad brush. But I do think it’s a reality that it’s part of what I represent. It’s not just that I’m young; it’s that I go to college campuses when I travel in Iowa, and when I travel in New Hampshire, and when we’re traveling this country. I go to black churches when I go to South Carolina in rural areas, even if they’re mostly Democrats.
We have to be willing to unshackle ourselves and actually speak to the next generation and bring them along with leadership. And I think that we’re too used to in our movement running from something, and I think that’s something that tends to be true amongst maybe some career politicians of an older generation.
I’m running to something. I’m running to a vision for what this country was founded on, revive the idea of the individual over group identity. The family, something we’ve forgotten. Two parents who bring you into this world, and you as two parents who bring children into this world in a nuclear family structure. That’s what I grew up in.
That’s what we give to our children. Reviving belief in the nation, in belief in God. Actually, that’s something that we’ve lost in our culture too, and that’s, I think, as a young person, as a millennial, when I’m talking about these concepts, I think part of what I’m able to do is we can make those concepts cool again. You know what I mean?
We can make those concepts appealing to the next generation rather than making them seem like tired old concepts. This is what’s true and that’s what we need to revive. And part of what I’m able to bring to the table, not just that, hey, I’m young and the other guy’s old, so, therefore, I’m better. I reject that.
It’s another form of identity politics, but the reason I’m able to do it as a vessel is that I can reach that next generation and really reach all Americans to say that no, these aren’t outdated concepts, faith in God, belief in a nuclear family structure with two parents in the house. That’s cool. That’s actually heterodox today, right? So you wanna be a hippie and stand up to the system, that’s the way you actually do it. (Kittle chuckles)
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Photo “Vivek Ramaswamy” by Vivek Ramaswamy.
