From his 2024 tirade against American workers to his contempt for MAGA voters, Vivek Ramaswamy has turned a safe Ohio win into a self-inflicted mess.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a DEI candidate — and an unqualified one. Republicans do not vote for unqualified DEI candidates. Historically, they never have.
For the good of Ohio, the Republican Party, and MAGA voters nationwide, Vivek Ramaswamy should withdraw from the Ohio gubernatorial race. His candidacy is not merely ill-advised; it is corrosive. At a moment when unity and discipline matter, he threatens to fracture the coalition President Trump assembled and to waste political capital ahead of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential cycle, when Ohio native JD Vance is widely expected to lead the ticket.
All Ramaswamy had to do was remain silent and act like a normal Republican for 18 months. He couldn’t.
Ramaswamy’s problem is not policy disagreement. It is temperament, judgment, and an inability to restrain himself. His habit of attacking critics as racists, trolls, or bad actors poisons the well. Democrats, corporate media, and professional activists already do that job. Republicans do not need a gubernatorial candidate doing it from inside the party.
In 2024, 3,189,116 Ohioans voted for Donald Trump. It strains credulity to claim that Ramaswamy is more qualified to govern Ohio than virtually any one of them.
The Ohio GOP’s decision to anoint him as a gubernatorial candidate is indefensible. Any competent Republican with discipline wins statewide office comfortably. Yet this charade continues: GOP leadership has tried for decades to impose an identity-driven strategy on a party whose voters reject it.
During the Great Recession, at age 24, Ramaswamy accepted a $90,000 “scholarship” from the brother of George Soros. He had already earned more than $1.2 million in the prior three years and reported $2.25 million in income the year he accepted the award.
Later, much of his wealth flowed from Axovant Sciences, which aggressively promoted an Alzheimer’s breakthrough to retail investors after early trials had failed—a textbook pump-and-dump that left ordinary Americans holding the bag.
Ramaswamy launched a quixotic presidential campaign, which he parlayed into a brief role in the Trump administration and a partnership with Elon Musk under the DOGE initiative. That arrangement ended almost as quickly as it began.
During the holidays — entirely unprovoked — Ramaswamy took to X to berate American workers as lazy and culturally deficient while praising foreign H-1B visa holders. He mocked American childhood culture, disparaged “jocks and prom queens,” and lamented that Americans watched “Boy Meets World” instead of competing in math olympiads.
The Trump administration quietly removed him from his DOGE role before he was even formally installed. Voters noticed. The internet does not forget.
In his New York Times op-ed, Ramaswamy argued that America is an abstract idea detached from ancestry, history, or continuity — and that descendants of those who built the nation have no greater claim to it than recent arrivals or anchor babies.
That view is not widely held, nor is it reflected in the American tradition. From America’s founders to Alexis de Tocqueville and Theodore Roosevelt, continuity, inheritance, and culture have always mattered.
Ramaswamy has shown repeated contempt for his own voters. He did not have to attack white Americans over Christmas. He did not have to insult the Republican base in the New York Times. He did not have to liken MAGA voters to extremists.
All Ramaswamy had to do was remain silent and act like a normal Republican for 18 months. He couldn’t.
For Ohio Republicans, the choice is clear: either withdraw from the race or risk fracturing their party and diminishing electoral prospects.
