Vivek Ramaswamy for the win at the Foxbot debate. The 38-year old millionaire biotech bro staked out the “Trumpiest” political real estate on the oftentimes out of control debate stage last night and gave the audience precisely what they wanted. In doing so, Ramaswamy won last night’s GOP debate handily. He was brash, on MAGA message and infinitely anti-Establishmentarian all at once, the things that made his idol, Donald Trump, President in 2016. Which begs the question: Why vote for Vivek — “Trump, lite (brown)” — when Trump is already in the race and the frontrunner?
Answer: Nothing.
Further, Vivek Ramaswamy, to be quite frank, could never win the Republican nomination, much less the Presidency, anyway. Because his particular brand of anti-Establishmentarianism can only be properly construed under the category of wackadoodledoo. He wants, for example, to cancel Juneteenth. Who even thinks that way? He has said that the American objective in the Ukraine should not be for Putin to lose. Whaaaa? Ramaswamy calls climate change a “hoax.” He has argued, entirely without any supporting facts, that most lesbians don’t like gay men and vice-versa. (????) He wants to raise the voting age to 25, unless young citizens join the military or passes a test. Oh, and he also wants to eliminate the FBI.
Further, Ramaswamy thinks — in his arrogance of making millions before the age of 40 — that he is something of an expert on foreign policy (and, basically, everything). It is the arrogance of youth and, more precisely, the arrogance of youthful success operating here. Similarly, Jared Kushner thought he was something of an expert on perennially vexing foreign policy matters before the age of 40, even handling the Middle East portfolio of the Trump administration, because he was rich (and, because he “read 25 books on it”). “(Jared) said flat out, don’t talk to me about history,” Aaron David Miller, a US peace negotiator for previous administrations who was consulted by Kushner, told The Guardian in 2020. “He said, I told the Israelis and the Palestinians not to talk to me about history too.” Damn cheek!
And yet, Ramaswamy has found a way to break through the multi-candidate field by not going through Trump (Ramaswamy, in fact, hues closely to Trump in all things), but by throwing the most anti-Establishmentarian bombs imaginable. Hmmm — sound familiar? “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,” Claire Potter wrote on Political Junkie. “It’s possible that the GOP is done with Taiwan, a long-term sacred cow for their party, but it is also possible that Ramsawamy and his supporters have no idea that it exists—or why.”
Not that any of this is going to get Ramaswamy anywhere in the Republican primary. Sure, it breaks him out of the pack — at the expense of Ron DeSantis. He will be the subject of the chattering class this weekend. Scenarios will be sketched on what ifs about his candidacy that will never materialize. It does not take him any closer, however, to the American Presidency. Still, theoretically, Ramaswamy’s extreme MAGA-loyalty bona fides cannot be all that displeasing to Trump, man who thrives on kisses to his rear. As I mentioned, Vivek’s rise in popularity comes at the expense of Trump’s top rival, Ron DeSantis. And Ramaswamy, whether or not he knows it, is effectively serving as something of a Trump surrogate on the debate stage. “This answer gave Vivek Ramaswamy a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH. Thank you Vivek!” Trump posted early Thursday morning on Truth Social.
But back to the debate stage. It should be noted that Ramaswamy also won the online attention race. From Phillip Bump from the Washington Post:
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.
Ramaswamy’s ploy worked. Analysis of Google search interest — a good proxy for evaluating which debate participants triggered the most curiosity of viewers — indicates that no one saw a consistent level of interest equivalent to Ramaswamy during the debate’s two hours.
The similarities between Ramaswamy and Trump are, no doubt, the reason for his uncanny ability to break out of the pack at this point in the game. Unelected, he can say the most Trumpy things, things that could evaporate the career of a more thoughtful and measured politician. But not Vivek! Other standouts on the debate stage that are going absolutely nowhere in the GOP primary: Nikki Haley and Chris “Kamikaze” Christie.
Wherefore art thou, Yevgeny Prigozhin
Is it true what they say? Has Yevgeny Prigozhin, former convict, chef and hot dog salesman-turned Wagner mercenary warlord passed on to “the hot place”? Did he who lived by the fiery sword die in a fiery plane crash? In which circle in Dante’s Inferno does he presently reside? And, is it any surprise? Putin needed a spectacular act of violence to regain some of his lost testicular mojo at the Kremlin, and this, written in the sky in blood, was it.
If Prigozhin has indeed shuffled off the mortal coil, it is hard to muster any tears of sympathy for the man. He was essentially a dead man walking the moment he crossed the Rubicon of Rostov-on-Don, but failed to move on to Moscow. He played the Game of Thrones, as they say, and lost. What was he thinking, by the way? Whether or not he had the air support to make Moscow is besides the point. That he attempted a coup against a dictator that failed is essentially a slow and protracted death sentence. Why not at least die on the field of battle? His anti-climactic life after that moment probably involved training his replacement and handing over all his contacts in Africa while waiting for the gun to the back of the head.
That he was not a good man goes without saying. “Important to clearly state the truth, which is that Prigozhin was a mass-murderer, responsible for atrocities on at least three different continents,” Tweeted Chris Hayes. Particularly in Africa. The BBC’s Frank Greer delves into Prigozhin’s handicraft on the Continent:
Wagner have also been operating in Syria for years but it is in Africa where they have achieved strategic success for the Kremlin. There they have developed a brutally effective business model that is proving popular with undemocratic regimes. By providing a range of "security services", from VIP protection to influencing elections, silencing critics, they have received in return mineral rights and access to gold and other precious metals in several African states. Money flows back to Moscow and everyone gets rich - except the actual populations of those countries.
Wagner troops have been accused of numerous human rights abuses including the massacre of civilians in Mali and Central African Republic. Yet they have succeeded in supplanting French and other western forces across a huge swathe of the African continent. Only this week Prigozhin popped up on a Telegram channel in a video presumed to have been filmed at a base in Mali, promising an expansion of Wagner's activities in Africa and "freedom" for its people.
And so Prigozhin went to the grave doing what he did so enthusiastically in his last years on the planet — recruiting killers. The African continent has become significantly more bloody with the operations by Wagner. All thanks to Prigozhin. In his last video, several days old, he is seen recruiting mercenaries in a video that looks like it was shot in Bamako, Mali. He is in camouflage gear holding a rifle. Can we even say the circumstances surrounding his death are suspicious when they are really not? A butcher in the service of a dictator until his plane “fell out of the sky.”
Better — and longer the life of — a hot dog seller than a butcher of men. RIP.
“‘For Xi, the goal is to try to discredit the West and show that there is an alternative out there,’ said Eric Olander, the chief editor of The China-Global South Project website. ‘He’s trying to tap into this incredible well of grievance and frustration among many Global South countries over what they perceive as this massive duplicity and hypocrisy on the part of rich countries.’” ( David Pierson and Lynsey Chutel/NYT)
“Donald Trump’s competitiveness in a general election matchup with Joe Biden is due mainly to intense loyalty from Republican voters. In a recent New York Times/Siena national poll that had Biden and Trump tied with 43% of the vote, only 7% of Republicans, including leaning independents, preferred Biden to Trump. Among respondents who reported voting for Trump in 2020, the former president led Biden 91%-2%. Given the close divide in the country between supporters of the two major parties, this sort of loyalty among Republican voters is what is keeping the 2024 presidential general election highly competitive.” (Alan Abramowitz/CenterforPolitics)
“Four very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—are creating a world where ‘nothing is true and all is spectacle’ … These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies—and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (‘Competition is for suckers,’ Thiel once posited.)” (Jonathan Taplin/VF)
“Fox is still undergoing its Kübler-Ross stages-of-grief process. The company has paid nearly nine-hundred million dollars in settlements this year. Executives fired Tucker Carlson, a generational star who commanded a loyal audience that hasn’t fully returned. Meanwhile, the company still faces the threat from Newsmax and OAN, which are skimming their most right-wing viewers; the Smartmatic lawsuit, one that is even more justified than Dominion’s and could command a payout that includes the ‘B’ word (for billion); and the awful demographics of cable, with pay-TV subscriptions falling to the lowest levels since 1992.” (CJR)
“Last Friday, the government of Mali formally withdrew that consent and ordered the 13,000 strong UN peacekeeping mission to leave the country ‘without delay.’ This kind of thing does happen, but it is exceedingly rare. In my 18 years of covering the United Nations, I can think of only one other instance (Eritrea, 2005) in which a government kicked out an entire peacekeeping force.” (Global Dispatches)