Ramaswamy and the Rest

The epigraph for the first 2024 Republican presidential debate came from Vivek Ramaswamy. “It is not morning in America. We’re living in a dark moment,” he said, midway through the melee in Milwaukee. He seemed to speak for every candidate on the stage during a dour and punchy evening on Fox News.

Ramaswamy was a fitting messenger for the mantra, because the debate was his coming-out party. He was, if not definitively the winner of the debate, clearly the main character. No other candidate was so eager to get in the mix on every issue, none so ready with quips, none so eager to land a blow on rivals, and none so likely to be the target of blows himself.

“Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name, and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?” Ramaswamy joked at the outset, borrowing a line from President Barack Obama. It’s a set piece that he’s unlikely to have to use again. Anyone who watched the debate knows now.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Ramaswamy’s central role was that anyone other than Donald Trump was able to claim the spotlight. The former president leads the polling in the Republican primary, but he skipped the debate, choosing instead to grant an interview to Tucker Carlson, a meeting of two men united by their grievances against Fox News. Ahead of the event, many pundits expected that Trump would manage to dominate, even in absence. But other than a single question about the former president’s felony indictments, moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum were remarkably effective at avoiding Trump’s shadow.

That was perhaps the only thing at which they were effective. The candidates, even mild-mannered ones like former Vice President Mike Pence, were able to steamroll the moderators, claiming far more time than allotted and dodging almost every question asked of them. The debate nearly featured a fascinating moment early on, when Fox played a video of a Catholic University student asking the candidates to assuage young people’s concerns about climate change. The moderators asked the candidates to raise their hands to say whether they believe humans are causing climate change. But the candidates rebelled, refusing to do so, and in the end only Ramaswamy and Governor Ron DeSantis gave clear answers. (They do not.)

This kind of domination of the stage and disrespect for moderators was innovative when Trump started doing it in the 2016 primary, but other Republicans have learned from him. And it was Ramaswamy, the most MAGA candidate onstage, who blew through the guidelines most. He jumped in on question after question, and reaped applause for it. He grinned broadly as rivals attacked him, and then used the response time that earned him to talk more. He openly mocked his rivals, at one point pantomiming a person testing the air by licking a finger while DeSantis tried to explain his position on Ukraine. “You have put down everybody on this stage,” former Ambassador Nikki Haley once grumbled.

This made Ramaswamy a target of many attacks, especially from former Governor Chris Christie, Pence, and Haley. Christie quipped that the last skinny guy with a funny name to stand on a debate stage was Barack Obama and said, with some reason, that Ramaswamy sounded like ChatGPT. Pence sneered that this moment was no time for “on-the-job training” for a novice like Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows,” Haley snapped.

Haley also had an unexpectedly strong performance. It’s no easy task for a former governor and ambassador to the United Nations to portray herself as an outsider, but she was quick on her feet and managed to attack the Republican establishment without falling into the DeSantis trap of veering into far-right rhetoric. She blasted rivals for voting for huge government-spending increases, and blistered Pence and others for claiming they’d pass a federal abortion ban despite the barriers to that in Congress. “Be honest with the American people,” Haley said.

The big loser in all of this was DeSantis, who desperately needed to show he was still the clear second-place candidate and failed to do so. Though he avoided adding to the gaffes that have sometimes haunted him on the campaign trail, he added few highlights. He reached for personal anecdotes, including about his own children, and ended up sounding clinical. DeSantis also dodged question after question: He didn’t explain how he would cut federal spending, whether he wanted a federal ban on abortion, how he’d fight crime (other than a weird aside about George Soros), or what to make of the Trump indictments.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is perpetually the subject of rumors of an impending breakout but never seems to actually break out, appeared to recede on the stage, where his affable affect and slow pace of speaking proved no match for the vitriol around him. Christie got in a few good lines, but did nothing to change the fact that his campaign is doomed, nor did Pence. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota squeaked onto the debate stage, but that won them little more than a front-row seat to the fireworks.

Watching how Ramaswamy handles his new turn in the spotlight will be interesting. He’s charismatic, a smooth orator, irreverent, and funny. But it’s easy to imagine that his shtick will wear thin. Ramaswamy sounds good, but once you slow down and think about what he said, it often makes little sense or means nothing. (A recent profile by my colleague John Hendrickson showcases Ramaswamy’s problems of substance.) He also projects the air of smarmy student-government president, which means that while Ramaswamy is aiming to be the next Trump, he risks instead becoming the next Ted Cruz. But Ramaswamy’s debate performance is sure to increase speculation that he could also be the next Mike Pence—or at least take his place at Trump’s side as a vice-presidential candidate.