Special Edition: DeSantis Fails To Glow; Vivek Ramaswamy Drags Trump's Base Further Right

And other thoughts on last night's Republican presidential primary debate

Thanks to those of you who returned to yesterday’s corrected post after its glitchy, incoherent arrival in your inbox—I’m still trying to figure out what happened. But to make it up to you: this was supposed to be a subscriber-only post, but I am opening it to all. And as long as it comes through intact, please:

Vivek Ramaswamy speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

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Just when you thought there was no more room on former president Donald J. Trump’s right when Ron DeSantis squeezed into that space, Hindu nationalism made its American debut on the Republican presidential debate stage last night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And although 38-year-old tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy was lectured severely by former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, he was shockingly successful with the crowd as he bleated out crazy pants ideas at warp speed.

Ramaswamy interrupted, babbled over others, metaphorically flipped off the moderators, and was occasionally lustily cheered by the partisan audience assembled by Fox Business. Of all the candidates, he showed the most profound Trumpianism: Ramaswamy is shockingly ignorant about almost everything, has no policy experience, and substituted random opinions for questions that seemingly required a fact-based answer. He unapologetically swiped Barack Obama’s tagline—"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?"—and then just grinned inanely when the Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called him out on it. He argued that the United States should abandon its defense of Europe and Asia—and then just tossed ending aid to Israel, I guess to see what would happen.

It’s possible that the GOP is done with Taiwan, a long-term sacred cow for their party, but it is also possible that Ramaswamy and his supporters have no idea that it exists—or why. And why pull back from the American alliance with Israel? Ramaswamy never proposed a logic for this (no, he isn’t pro-Palestinian), but this unprecedented moment in Republican politics provoked some boos but also cheers.

In other words, the Trumpian base longer cares about any foreign policy program that does not begin and end at our own national borders, involve cutting economic ties with China or stemming the flow of migrants from Mexico. These things, apparently, are only on the agenda of global elitists and Democrats. In the case of Mexico, DeSantis said that he would order border crossers to be shot on sight and promised a military invasion of Mexico to disable the drug cartels and stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. That got some cheers, too, as he stared manfully into the camera, and no one brought up Iraq or Afghanistan, which was…notable.

But Ramaswamy’s impertinence and DeSantis’s proposal to best Trump’s radically unfinished and impractical wall with a full-scale invasion of a neighboring country suggests two other things. First, the defense of Israel is no longer a sacred cow on the extremist right, a day I thought I would never see. Second, the GOP would seriously entertain a nominee who knows and cares even less about the rest of the world than Trump. Yes, there was pushback on Ramaswamy from Pence and Haley (who muttered at the end of one response, “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.”) But in general, no one seemed to care, particularly the moderators.

But there was no response from anyone to De Santis vowing to murder undocumented border crossers in cold blood or to his proposal to send American sons and daughters on an illegal fool’s errand into Mexico, where they would be shot at with the American-made weapons that fentanyl profits buy. This suggests to me that the populist calls to stop aid for Ukraine must be coupled more firmly to the GOP right’s love for authoritarians. Because really, there is no difference between invading Mexico on the pretext of stomping out drug trafficking in North America and Putin invading Ukraine on the pretext that it harbored Nazis and would serve as a stepping-off point for a NATO invasion of Russia.

Which candidates failed to break through? Prominently, Tim Scott. It’s inevitable, because they are from the same state and have actual political experience that he came off a poor second to Haley. She came off as more sophisticated on the issues (because Scott insists on presenting himself as your friendly, dull neighbor), and she has actual opinions that she reveals. You could also compare Scott to Burghum because both of them are nice and—have I said dull?

But nice won’t win anyone a nomination in this party in this election, and I don’t think dull is on anyone’s bingo card. DeSantis shares the dull column, which is really a stretch because he is such an awful person. I doubt he moved the needle either: he’s like a girl at the counter at Schrafft’s waiting to be discovered by Wilhelmina models, a guy who thinks that if he sticks around long enough, he is sure to be picked. DeSantis polished up the act he has been shilling all along—except that he never said the word “woke” once; no one asked a question or challenged him on his terrible, discriminatory education policies; and no one asked him about his animus towards LGBT kids, or why he doesn’t want trans people who work in Florida’s public university system to go to the bathroom, a policy that was announced right before the debate but that no one addressed. Nikki Halley said transgirls should be kept out of women’s bathrooms because this would help to stem suicidality among teenagers, and honestly, I don’t think even she knew what she was talking about.

And Trump’s absence? Other reports keep saying it was palpable, but except for Ramaswamy’s announcement that, as president, he would pre-emptively pardon the Insurrectionist-in-Chief, other candidates mostly dodged the question by railing about the “media” and the “weaponization” of the government. Except for Ramswamy, whose hand shot up like the best boy in the front row who everyone hates when asked if they would support Trump if he were the nominee (something, by the way, they pledged to do as a condition for getting on the stage), and Christie who said that Trump’s conduct was unpresidential, all the candidates kind of looked at each other and flapped their right arms uncertainly. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson was the lone candidate not to raise his hand, and no one cared because he is polling so poorly and is from Arkansas.

That says to me that none of them really know what to say about Trump now and that this problem will get worse for them, not better, as the former President’s legal circus starts sucking the oxygen out of the room.

Mostly, the debate was a two-hour yawner that taught us nothing new. It was timed, and the place was chosen, to suit the Midwestern voters any GOP primary candidate will need to show that he or she can go the distance to the nomination—and perhaps even the White House. To this end, I would argue that only Christie, Haley, and Pence looked at all presidential, and none of them has a snowball’s chance in Hell of being nominated. Governor Doug Burghum of North Dakota was the epitome of Midwestern nice and demonstrated—in the midst of talk about a federal abortion ban—that at least someone in the GOP has read the Dobbs decision. Surprisingly, to me at least, Nikki Haley came out as a complete squish on abortion: she is personally pro-life but noted the havoc that the decision has already caused. Christie said things that would have worked back in 2012 or so—that he was elected twice as a Republican in a deep Blue state, for example.

But Christie and Haley were speaking to a Republican political world that no longer exists, and I am not sure anyone but me noticed.