In the end, Trump devours his friends. The appetitive Id of the Republican Party slathers his former amigos with a healthy dollop of catsup before the destruction begins. The list of ravaged former allies turned “road beef” is long. As long as his unfashionable neckwear. Reince Preibus, Howard Stern, Ron DeSantis, Michael Cohen … the list goes on. All once were elevated enough to call him “bro;” all now can only be properly construed under the category of +Social Siberia+. Trump even turned against Fox & Friends, a show about fake friendship! How meta is that?
The remarkably low turnout notwithstanding, Trump rode to a landslide victory in last night’s Iowa caucus. But not before turning on Vivek Ramaswamy. The former libertarian rapper, as a result, promptly assumed the supine position by suspending his campaign and immediately endorsing Trump. Ramaswamy, Harvard ‘07, knows which way his bread is buttered. And while the ancient Greeks saw thymos as the emotive part of the soul, seeking, in proper proportion, glory and honor, Ramaswamy’s compulsion, like Trump’s, is to be superior to others. Their excess is thumotic.
The thymotic similarities between Trump and Ramaswamy are just uncanny. Are all thumotic excessives more or less similar? And say what you will about Cillizza, he is spot-on in his memoriam to the Ramaswamy’s Trumpesque campaign, right down to the marketing oversell:
Right until the end, Ramaswamy and his advisers were telling anyone who would listen that he was going to shock the world in Iowa — pointing his huge crowds and the level of excitement in the state for him. In the end, he got a little over 8,000 votes — less than 8% in the overall race. Even as it ended, he and the campaign were speaking in grand terms about “the movement” he had created. I didn’t — and don’t — see any evidence of said movement.
RIP to his ridiculousness. But what are we to make of Vivek’s quixotic campaign? And what of the obvious mirroring of the former President, which began soon after dining with him and his close friend, Jared Kushner, at Bedminster? It got some heat in August and September, after the first debate. It is actually sort of interesting, his strategy; interesting, but ultimately not effective. He literally took the Trump 2015 model of running for President and reworked it to this particular election cycle. And with Trump not sharing the election stage, Ramaswamy didn’t have any competition to spew right-wing conspiratorial talking points, ramble, speak over opponents and generally run the clock at will. Sound familiar?
And why is Vivek’s “familiar” so cranky?
It was, of course, the Trump model of serving red meat — well done, of course — to MAGA. Flooding the zone, so to speak. Making the career politicians on the stage, with their bland, nearly identical Establishmentarian talking points uninteresting by comparison. “This approach, in fact, is one that proved very successful for Trump during his own entry into presidential politics in 2015,” Philip Bump of the Washington Post accurately noted. “Trump, too, was unburdened by the normal constraints of political propriety or awareness; he, too, endorsed fringe positions he’d picked up from right-wing sources.”
Fringe positions delivered in an aggressive manner is the Trump political brand. But Vivek’s political positions were also — how does one put this politely? — batshit crazy. On the campaign trail he promised, among other bromides for Bubbas, to pardon Donald Trump on his first day in office, to end foreign aid to Mexico AND Central America (a bonanza for drug cartels!), dissolve the Department of Education and "Drill, frack & burn coal: abandon the climate cult.” “Thumotic excess,” thy name is Vivek. To know Ramaswamy, it is said, is to loathe him. And there are many reasons to loathe a man who is so obnoxious, so thumotically excessive, that he makes Nikki Haley, forgetter of slavery, into a sympathetic figure. Well, almost.
And so the youngest candidate in the field failed miserably at Republican politics. But in the process, he became something of a celebrity. He fell upwards, in the grand tradition of so many Harvard graduates before him. Ramaswamy’s campaign platformed false ideas from the nether reaches of the far-righto sphere of the internet in the service of seeking higher status in society. Higher speaking fees will soon reflect his upgrade in social position from former biotech entrepreneur to libertarian valorizer of “alternative facts.” Democratic capitalism unfortunately does not account for the harmful conspiracy theories that he disseminated and normalized before large audiences and what that affect that viral spread will have on America going forward. But — mirabile dictu! — in the process we may get a Ramaswamy media empire.
Finally, the laughter in the dark will be Vivek counting the number of zeros in his bank account as the conspiracy Bubbas and Q yoga moms marinate in the notion that January 6th was an “inside job” fomented by the FBI. How long before the rollout of a thumotically-excessive, conspiracy-focused Vivek podcast? Isn’t that the next, most obvious media play for such an obnoxious climber? “He’s trying to be the next Alex Jones or Nick Fuentes,” longtime Iowa GOP strategist Dave Kochel told Meryl Kornfield of the Washington Post. As if this country, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, needs any more of those.
“I was fooling around with the latest YouGov/Economist poll and marveling anew at how bad Republicans think the economy is … The unemployment rate last month was 3.7%. It's been under 4% for 24 straight months. The unemployment rate in 2023 was the lowest in the past half century … Now, this is average unemployment. Maybe you think there are individual places where unemployment is high, and the survey is picking up those folks. After all, the unemployment rate in Merced is 9%! But that's not it. In the entire country, only 2.3% of all metro areas have unemployment rates over 7%—almost all of them small farming regions in California. Nor is it anything else. Unemployment is at historic lows for white people, Black people, and Hispanic people. For men and for women. For the young and the old. By virtually any measure, unemployment is historically low for everyone and has been for the past two years.” (Jabberwocking)
“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Israeli hostages who are in Gaza because we’ve reached the 100-day mark of their captivity. And in Jewish communities there have been a series of events around that 100-day mark. And watching these events for the hostages, what strikes me is that the organizations that are organizing these events, and have been organizing throughout these 100 days to keep the focus on the hostages and to demand their release, are also generally organizations that support the war. And emotionally, that makes a lot of sense because I think in a period of agony and grief and pain like this, there’s a desire for Jewish solidarity, which I feel as well … So, first of all, one of the things that I think has become clear over these several months is that Israel’s military force in Gaza is not leading to the rescue of Israeli hostages. There may have been one person who was rescued very early on, but Israel has not since then rescued any hostages despite having all of these soldiers there.” (Peter Beinart)
“King was born in Atlanta on another Monday, January 15, 1929. Had he not been assassinated in his prime in Memphis is 1967, he might even still be with us today, an old man. King is one of America’s greatest and most inspiring heroes. Why? Because he spoke eloquently and often about love and against hate, even though he grew up Black in the south and had good reason to hate, as a Black man abused in a violently racist society. We close schools and banks on his birthday to remember him precisely because of his ability to remind people living in this cruel, unjust, brutal world, that the only possible solution is not violence and hate but love. King’s birthday this year happens to coincide with the day Republicans of Iowa are expected to become the first state to nominate Donald Trump to the their party’s presidential candidate. He will win Iowa in large part because of the influence of white Evangelical Christians, encouraged by men who, like King, root their rhetoric in the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus. The megachurch stages of Iowa are populated by men who have twisted the teachings of Christ beyond all recognition. ‘You can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat,’ MAGA megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin - a man with a million Twitter followers - said last week.” (Nina Burleigh/American Political Freakshow)
“US forces struck targets in Yemen, in retaliation for attacks in the Red Sea. The front-page top headline in yesterday’s New York Times was None Wanted Regional War, But Here It Is. For American voters could this become a ‘hot-war’ election? With US troops engaged overseas, and with all the unpredictability that “hot war” campaigns bring? Or will it remain one where the US debate mainly concerns how much to support warfare by others? And in these same past few days: the International Court of Justice began hearing South Africa’s case against Israel for genocide; the US Secretary of Defense was hospitalized for many days without informing the President; Russian forces strengthened their hold on Ukraine’s eastern front; and there’s the southern border. Which of these will seem most consequential ten months from now?” (James Fallows)
“Election officials across the U.S. are confident they can overcome foreign and domestic hacking threats to run a secure election this November. They’re far less sanguine that Americans will believe them. And they’re terrified of the backlash from those who don’t accept the results. ‘I’m scared to death’ about the level of voter distrust heading into 2024, said Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, which includes the capital of Tallahassee. Earley’s comments were echoed by dozens of others among a crowd of nearly 100 local election workers who gathered in Crystal City, Virginia, last week for an annual confab hosted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The depth of anxiety aired at the conference offers a small but alarming window into the challenges facing frontline election workers less than 10 months before Americans will head to the polls to choose their next commander in chief.” (John Sakellariadis/Politico)
“At a Chicago gathering of Obama alumni late last year, attendees quietly raised worries that Biden’s reelection operation was too bare-bones — that he hadn’t announced staff in key battleground states or dispatched any of his top White House lieutenants to campaign headquarters in Wilmington. Some, more pointedly, were concerned that Biden’s 2020 pandemic campaign, run largely from his home in Delaware, left the president and his team unfamiliar with the complexities of a true national ground game … Many Biden allies and operatives see these concerns among their Obama contemporaries as overstated — and the press’ coverage of them as stale. In the months since the alumni reunion, the Biden campaign has staffed up in battleground states, with leadership announced in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and North Carolina. Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm election, they believe, also showed the merit of building up the Democratic National Committee rather than creating an outside group like Organizing for America, the Obama-led offshoot that failed to prevent a political bloodbath in the 2010 cycle.” (Holly Otterbein/Politico)