Vivek Ramswamy’s Campaign To Replace Trump Crashes & Burns Just 48 Hours to Iowa’s Caucus

By Brian Cates

After months of riding former President Donald J. Trump’s rather large coattails to attention, fame and some popularity, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign to split the vote of the Trump/MAGA base came to an abrupt and jarring halt less than 48 hours before the US primary/caucus season kicks off in Iowa tomorrow night.

When he announced his run for the US Presidency back in February of 2023, Ramaswamy garnered almost no attention at the time. He was unknown, had never run for any political office, and he found it hard to gain any real traction, especially when Trump’s former UN ambassador, the former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley, chose to make her own presidential run announcement that same month.

Trump, Haley and Ramaswamy were later joined by two other very well-known political figures: current governor of Florida Ron DeSantis and former governor of New Jersey Chris Christie.

DeSantis ended months of speculation about his running by formally announcing in May, while Christie waited until June to proclaim he was jumping in too.

As I wrote here exclusively for Vigilant News Network, Christie’s moribund campaign never really showed any signs of life before he finally did the inevitable and ended it earlier this week; he failed to climb at all in the polls since his announcement, and it quickly became apparent that there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for his campaign theme, which was that Trump never should have been President in the first place, his term in office was an absolute disaster and it would be a major and horrifying mistake for American voters to return him to the White House.

Once the GOP presidential debates began to be held, hardly anyone paid any real attention to Christie anyway, because it was at these GOP Presidential debates that Ramaswamy finally found a way to get himself some real national attention, and what Ramaswamy did was brilliantly successful.

His strategy to grab the limelight not only allowed Ramaswamy to overshadow the rotund Christie, but to also get nearly as much attention as DeSantis and Haley.

Since Trump was the obvious frontrunner in the race, and was not participating in the debates, this made Trump the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’.

The strategy Ramaswamy utilized to force everyone to pay attention to him, how he got numerous successful soundbites off, soundbites that were played all across the news and social media was this:

He would play the role of the ‘Trump stand-in’ at the debates, saying the kind of things Trump would say if he were there.

And it worked.

One thing that cannot be taken from Ramaswamy is his brilliant grasp of communication skills and argument. Time and again he left DeSantis, Haley and Christie sputtering and annoyed by dropping Trump-like zingers that seized the moment.

Ramaswamy also garnered a lot of positive attention from the way he handled the hostile Fake News Media, which attempted several times – with embarrassing results – to hit the candidate with several ‘gotcha!’ questions.

That of course is something that the Trump base loves to see, and so Ramaswamy managed to carve himself out a nice little niche as the ‘friendly Trump stand-in’ participating in the GOP establishment debates and saying the naughty Trump-like things that made DeSantis, Haley and Christie get upset. 

Trump himself seemed friendly with Ramaswamy, saying nice things about him on his Truth Social account.

And things were going swimmingly well for Ramaswamy up until the afternoon of Saturday, January 13. When all of a sudden, Trump posted this to his Truth Social account:

Hmmmm. Did Vivek do or say anything that day that might’ve provoked this kind of response from the former President?

Apparently so.

Because all of a sudden, in what appeared to be a last-ditch attempt to move the needle and split the vote of the Trump/MAGA base in Iowa, Ramaswamy suddenly introduced a new theme into his campaign pitch:

“Vote for me to save Donald Trump!”

The candidate was seen on video fervently exhorting an Iowa voter to vote for him since if she voted for Trump, she would sending Trump to his…doom.

Ramaswamy even posted this picture to his social media:

Now, if you’ve studied Donald J. Trump as much as I have since 2017, going all the way back to his days as a young man just before entering the New York Military Academy in 1959, you know he self-describes himself as a ‘Queens guy’.  A New Yorker’s New Yorker.  Anybody who knows anything about Trump and his ego would have little problem foreseeing how he would react to being told that guy who’s been happily riding his coattails for the last year is now saying he’s going to ‘save’ him. 

When Trump heard about Vivek’s cool new campaign theme, and was likely shown that picture above, his facial expression was probably something close to this image below.

Trump would take **immediate** and **very strong action** to let Ramaswamy know that he’s not eagerly waiting for Ramaswamy to do anything for him. He literally doesn’t need Ramaswamy for anything, Vivek’s got this exactly backwards. 

When the guy who’s been riding your coattails for almost a year now starts telling you he’s the one who’s actually going to ‘save’ you, and makes a serious move to split your base and carve off some votes for himself, perhaps its time to strongly remind him how this relationship actually works? Perhaps its time to rudely yank the coattails out from under his feet?

The Little Dog can be friends with the Big Dog. It can hover in the Big Dog’s shadow, travel around with the Big Dog, eat the Big Dog’s scraps, bark at the other dogs that the Big Dog doesn’t like. It can seem that they have a very good relationship with each other.

But the moment the Little Dog forgets himself and tries to take the Big Dog’s bone, he’s going to be very quickly and rudely reminded that he’s not the Big Dog.

Only the Big Dog can be the Big Dog. And the Little Dog would do well to remember that.

Now that Trump has rug-pulled him, Ramaswamy’s campaign is all but over. The friendly attentions of the Trump base to his Trump stand-in act is no more. Very few, if any, of Trump’s supporters in Iowa were planning to throw Ramaswamy a sympathy vote anyway.

Besides, why would anybody vote for the ‘Trump stand-in’ when Trump himself is on the ballot? Ramaswamy had a nice illusion going, but then made a fatal mistake at the eleventh hour:

He forgot he was the Little Dog.