In a recent interview with Glenn Beck, CEO of Blaze Media, former President Donald Trump spoke on a variety of subjects, including his views on potential running mates.
Trump expressed openness to the idea of selecting entrepreneur and political commentator Vivek Ramaswamy as a potential vice president, praising his intelligence and enthusiasm but cautioning about his sometimes controversial stances.
During the one-on-one discussion, Beck asked Trump about considering Ramaswamy as a possible VP.
“You said that you weren’t going, but you would be watching the debate for a vice president. Have you thought of Vice President Ramaswamy?” asked Beck.
“I think he’s great. Look, anybody that said I’m the best president in a generation… I have to like a guy like that,” said Trump.
“I can’t get upset with him but he’s a smart guy. He’s a young guy. He’s got a lot of talent. He’s a very very very intelligent person. He’s got good energy and he could be in some form of something,” Trump added.
However, the former President also offered a note of caution. “He’s starting to get out there a little bit. He’s a little bit getting a little bit controversial. I got to tell him, be a little bit careful, because some things you have to hold in just a little bit, right?” Trump advised, emphasizing that Ramaswamy’s controversial statements could be a potential issue.
WATCH:
Vivek Ramaswamy is facing growing scrutiny for his apparent inconsistencies on various political and social issues.
New York Times reported:
Mr. Ramaswamy’s pattern of falsehoods has been the subject of intensifying scrutiny by the news media and, more recently, his G.O.P. opponents, who clashed with him often during the party’s first debate last Wednesday.
There are layers to Mr. Ramaswamy’s distortions: He has spread lies and exaggerations on subjects including the 2020 election results, the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol and climate change. When challenged on those statements, Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who is the first millennial Republican to run for president, has in several instances claimed that he had never made them or that he had been taken out of context.
But his denials have repeatedly been refuted by recordings and transcripts from Mr. Ramaswamy’s interviews — or, in some cases, excerpts from his own book.
Here are a few of the concerns that have been made by DC Draino and others about Vivek:
2020 Election Fraud
Candace Owens hosted a heated debate between conservative influencer DC Draino and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy on her well-known podcast, Candace Owens Podcast.
The podcast provided a platform for the two to face off directly.
DC Draino grilled Ramaswamy by calling out his alleged flip-flopping on critical topics, including:
Initially believing the 2020 election wasn’t stolen through ballot fraud
Supporting former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6th
Expressing interest in re-entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
Advocating for “no cap” on educated immigrants
Encouraging everyone to get vaccinated
“And just like magic, Vivek changed many of his positions and now claims: -there was 2020 ballot fraud -only wants bilateral trade deals -regrets getting the vax,” Draino wrote on Twitter.
“But he stuck to his guns on “no cap” immigration for high-skilled immigrants Nobody has been asking Vivek the tough questions even though he’s a Big Pharma exec that appeared out of nowhere, so I did,” Draino added.
DC Draino expressed his concerns about Ramaswamy’s past statements, including quotes from his book that seemed to criticize President Trump regarding the January 6 incident and called him a loser.
Draino directly questioned Ramaswamy’s stance on the 2020 election’s fairness, and whether the election was rigged.
Draino said, “I started to dig a little deeper on Twitter, and I came across some passages from your book. And I don’t know which book it is. It’s one of the two. But it talks about January 6, and it says, “It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.””
The quoted passage is from Ramaswamy’s book Nation of Victims, published in 2022, in which he lambastes Trump for refusing to concede the election’s outcome, dubbing him a “loser” and and detailed Trump’s futile efforts to overturn the results.
Draino continued, “Do you think that the 2020 election was fair? Do you think that Joe Biden got the most votes in American history? Or do you think 2020 was rigged?”
Ramaswamy provided a comprehensive response. He explained the nature of the quoted passage from his book, which he claimed had been taken out of context. According to Ramaswamy, he was actually referring to Stacey Abrams.
“Those exact words I’m referring to, of course, Stacey Abrams, that was literally the opening paragraph of that chapter. And it turned out that those words were literally borrowed from a description of somebody else criticizing Donald Trump that I then cut and pasted,” Ramaswamy said.
But in a recent interview NBC News host Chuck Todd, Ramaswamy flip-flopped again and confirmed that he was referring to Trump as a “sore loser” along with Stacey Abrams.
“I referred in that chapter both to Stacy Abrams and to Donald Trump,” Ramaswamy said.
Re-entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
“Here is the Twitter Space with Elon where Vivek says he wants to re-enter TPP He backtracked those statements on the Candace Owens show but I called out his flip-flop,” DC Draino wrote.
Here is the Twitter Space with Elon where Vivek says he wants to re-enter TPP
He backtracked those statements on the Candace Owens show but I called out his flip-flop https://t.co/mzlxWgFGtW
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) August 11, 2023
Ties to Soros
Last month, Ramaswamy defended himself in a Twitter video for accepting a $90,000 award from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
This fellowship was named after George Soros’s older brother, Paul Soros, a Hungarian-born American businessman and philanthropist, often called “the invisible Soros.”
Vivek said in a video posted on X, “In 2010, I won a scholarship when I was 24 or 25 years old and headed to law school that was partly funded not by George Soros but by Paul Soros, George’s brother. [Paul] made his money independently and who, by the way, is now dead, funded hundreds of people – hundreds of kids. I was one of them, to go to graduate school at the age of 24 or 25, back when I didn’t have a lot of money to do it.”
However, Vivek Ramaswamy was already a millionaire by the time he accepted the Soros scholarship he previously said he needed in order to pay for law school, FOX News reported.
When Ramaswamy accepted the award in 2011, he was a first-year law student at Yale and had been working for several years as an investment analyst at the hedge fund QVT Financial, according to FOX News.
However, recent revelations regarding Ramaswamy’s financial records paint a different picture. In the same year he accepted the award, Ramaswamy reported $2,252,209 in total income, according to his tax returns. He also reported a total of $1,173,690 in income in the three years prior.
Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia page was updated to remove information about his association with Paul Soros, raising questions about the transparency of Ramaswamy’s candidacy according to critics.
According to Mediate, Ramaswamy seems to have paid Wikipedia editor “Jhofferman,” to remove content from his page that Ramaswamy believed would undermine his candidacy in the Republican primary. A few days later, Ramaswamy declared his intention to run in 2024.
“According to the article’s version history, the editor removed lines about Ramaswamy’s receipt of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011,” the outlet reported.
Ties to WEF
Ramaswamy has also faced scrutiny over his inclusion in the WEF’s 2021 ‘Young Global Leader’ list published on March 10, 2021. Despite rejecting the award and repeatedly asking for his name to be removed, the WEF refused.
“The World Economic Forum named me on a list of so-called young global leaders. They did it despite the fact that I turned down their award. They kept my name on that list despite the fact that I repeatedly asked them to take it off because I did not share their values. I’m an opponent of it,” Ramaswamy said.
After two years on the list, Ramaswamy was removed by the WEF after he filed a lawsuit against the company earlier this year, saying, “This is an organization that does a lot of wrong and I’ve opposed it publicly and believe it should be held accountable.”
Funny you should bring this up. The first chapter of my upcoming book in April has the “receipts” of my exchanges with the World Economic Forum years ago when they *repeatedly* kept trying to get me to be named. I gave them a polite “hell no.” Reveals the games that WEF plays. https://t.co/v5SVRr1p9z
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) February 22, 2023
Mask Mandate
On the topic of face masks, Ramaswamy acknowledged that he made a statement encouraging people to buy masks out of personal responsibility early on in the pandemic, in opposition to government advice. However, he clarified that as the scientific understanding of masks evolved, so did his stance.
“I’ll admit it, my anti-government instincts got the better of me. Because I don’t know if you all remember this, but back in March, April 2020, when I put that tweet out, which said that we should buy masks based on individual personal responsibility or whatever it was that I said, that was in response to the government, including Fauci and the head of the CDC, laughing at people for buying masks and telling people across this country that they shouldn’t buy masks. I have inherently libertarian instincts,” he said.
Involvement in the Ohio COVID-19 Response Team
Ramaswamy’s alleged work with Ohio’s COVID-19 response team was also removed from his Wikipedia page at his request, a move that has raised eyebrows.
According to Mediate, “Also removed from the page on February 9, 2023 was Ramaswamy’s role on the state of Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team. The editor recorded that Ramaswamy’s Covid-era work was removed from the article by the candidate’s own explicit request, while his Soros fellowship was deemed “extraneous material” by the editor.”
Ties to NIH
Vivek Ramaswamy’s company, Datavant, partnered with the National Institutes of Health to create a database of patients’ personal medical information.
“Regenstrief Institute, Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) and Datavant are supporting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a national effort to securely gather data to help scientists understand and develop treatments for COVID-19,” according to the news release.
“Regenstrief, Datavant and Indiana CTSI created solutions that will enable the linking of data from different sources without the identifiers, improving the quality and completeness of the information while still protecting patient identities. This process will make data more useful to researchers as they work to understand the virus and develop solutions to address it.”
“Datavant provides the privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) technology which underpins de-identified data contributions to the NIH COVID-19 Data Warehouse, including the N3C, ensuring patient records are shared safely, securely, and privately in compliance with de-identification standards. De-identified data linkages within and with the N3C will address the challenges of assembling comprehensive patient records in large-scale clinical research due to care fragmentation and data fragmentation.”
That’s a half-truth. The other half is that he IS Big Pharma, has partnered with other Big Pharma firms like Pfizer, and one of his company’s joint ventures sued Moderna claiming responsibility for one of the mandated & infamous experimental mRNA vaccines link:… https://t.co/4iNDNyLhAn pic.twitter.com/r85GUFG0EM
— Hirsh Vardhan Singh (@HirshSingh) August 24, 2023
San-Francisco-based Datavant is a unit of Roivant Sciences, which Vivek Ramaswamy owns.
Voting Record Shows He is Not a Registered Republican
In a recent revelation, GOP presidential candidate Hirsh Singh has brought to light controversial details concerning Vivek Ramaswamy’s political affiliations and voting history. Documentation obtained from the Franklin County, Ohio Board of Elections suggests that Ramaswamy is not a registered Republican but, rather, a registered “Unaffiliated” voter.
Voting records, initially posted by an account called Ohio Legislative Watch on X, show Ramaswamy did not vote in the Ohio state primaries in 2022 and 2023.
“Well this is awkward. GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who lives in Columbus, is not a registered Republican in Ohio and has skipped half of the elections since registering to vote in Franklin County,” the account wrote, adding, “His wife is also unaffiliated and skipped the same elections.”
“His parents live in Hamilton County and do not appear to be registered to vote at all, at least not at the address where they claim an owner-occupied property tax reduction,” the post concluded.
Adding to the controversy, Federal Election Commission (FEC) data reveals that Ramaswamy was a donor to the Democratic Party in the 2016 Democratic Primary.
FEC records show that on March 29, 2016, Vivek Ramaswamy made a $2,700 ActBlue donation to the Friends of Dena campaign group, which is associated with Democratic Party congressional candidate Dena Minning Grayson.
In a statement to The Gateway Pundit, Vivek’s Senior Advisor Tricia McLaughlin said that the donation to Dena Minning Grayson “was not a political in support, purely friendship.”
Regarding not voting in Republican primaries, Vivek doesn’t align himself with any particular party.
“In regards to not voting in a Republican primary, Vivek is not a party man,” McLaughlin said.
In 2003, Vivek also asked Rev. Al Sharpton during a townhall.
“Hello, I’m Vivek. And to ask you last week on the show we had Senator Kerry and this week and the week before we had Senator Edwards. And my question for you is of all the Democratic candidates out there, why should I vote for the one with the least political experience?”
WATCH:
WATCH: In 2003, Rev. Al Sharpton schools a young student named Vivek Ramaswamy who questioned the then-presidential candidate’s political experience. https://t.co/NKp94fHi4d pic.twitter.com/55btP73Bgx
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 29, 2023
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