He called it fentanyl. He said it was killing children. He said it all on the campaign trail as he touted his openness to using the power of government to ban the social media platform TikTok.
But now that Donald Trump has announced his opposition to banning it, Vivek Ramaswamy has decided the fentanyl killing kids isn't so bad after all. So goes another "outside-the-beltway common man" acting just like an "inside-the-beltway professional politician."
For the record, I don't take pleasure in pointing this out. You need only go back to June 2023 to see how impressed I had become with the extemporaneous speaking abilities of Ramaswamy. At the time, Vivek was touring the state of Iowa, dismantling media narratives and articulating a powerful pro-business, pro-capitalism message.
I openly wondered at the time why Ramaswamy wasn't surging in the Republican polls. Unfortunately, it didn't take me too long to find my answer. I think the first moment it dawned on me was when Vivek described Trump as, "the best president of the 21st century." I couldn't have been the only person wondering why, if a man really believed that to be true, they would ever consider running against that same president in a re-election bid.
Looking back, it's hard to say whether a deal had actually been brokered between Vivek and the now presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. But as the lackluster primary campaign drug on, it didn't take a genius to figure out the role that Vivek was playing. While Trump dodged his Republican competitors, hiding behind his Truth Social account, Ramaswamy acted as his proxy bulldog - attacking the former president's most vocal detractors while simultaneously praising him and demanding that all the others in the field pledge to pardon Trump if elected.
One of the most famous moments in that regard was the extraordinarily uncomfortable exchange between Ramaswamy and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. It all started when Vivek was asked about his apparent hypocrisy on the TikTok issue.
Here was Ramaswamy in February of 2023:
Notice that last tweet - Ramaswamy acknowledged he was supportive of an effort to totally ban TikTok from public use. But fast-forward to that fateful November 8th debate:
- Haley called Ramaswamy out for his campaign having just joined TikTok.
- Vivek returned fire by going after Haley's 25-year-old daughter having an account herself
- Haley bit back, calling Vivek "scum," and warning him not to mention her daughter's name.
And, precisely as always occurs in these "debates," the drama quickly buried any meaningful exchange over the issue.
Now, just a few months after that awkwardness, Vivek is back on the topic, this time provoked by Donald Trump's own TikTok flip-flop.
In an August 2020 executive order, Trump claimed the app:
... threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information - potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.
But all that is water under the bridge for the former president who now says that he opposes the effort to ban TikTok, suggesting that doing so would help anti-Trump platforms like Facebook. Oh, and it just so happens that a major Republican donor named Jeff Yass is a billion-dollar investor in TikTok's parent company, ByteDance.
Trump surrogates like Vivek, who had previously spoken so forcefully against the CCP'S spyware app, was asked his thoughts. And to everyone's surprise (please note my sarcasm), Vivek decided that what Trump thinks is what he thinks too.
Pay attention to these words from that clip:
And this is the problem with professional politicians. President Trump isn't a professional politician, and neither am I. But many people in professional politics, they look at what they're supposed to say. And they act like billiard balls on a pool table. They go in whatever direction they're hit without thinking about the actual why.
Look, maybe Vivek is still auditioning for the vice-presidential role on Trump's 2024 ticket, I can't be sure. But I can say with certainty that if that job doesn't pan out for him, it's clear he'd make a great billiard ball on the pool tables at Mar-a-Lago.
