Vivek Ramaswamy’s vision is America first — even more than Trump
By Miranda Devine
May 3, 2023 11:21pm
While Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are busy tearing chunks out of each other, there is an unlikely sleeper candidate in the Republican race who is quietly winning hearts and awakening hope across the country with his sunny version of America First.
Vivek Ramaswamy, 37, the woke-busting entrepreneur, son of Indian immigrants from Ohio and the GOP’s first millennial presidential candidate, is rising steadily in opinion polls, just 10 weeks after announcing his candidacy on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
In one CBS poll this week, he managed to tie with former VP Mike Pence in third place among likely Republican voters, ahead of establishment figures such as Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Tim Scott and Asa Hutchinson.
He’s pitching himself as a more energetic but less divisive version of Trump, as “the outsider that doesn’t just talk about draining the swamp,” he said in New Hampshire this week. “I’m going to get the job done . . . I see an opportunity to do in 2020 what Ronald Reagan did in 1980, win a landslide election.”
He preaches that it is not enough merely to point out the hypocrisies of the left’s “secular religions” of “racial wokeism, gender ideology and the climate cult.”
These are just symptoms of a national identity crisis, he says, caused by turning away from the founding values of the country, from success by merit and adherence to the rule of law, values that wooed immigrants like his Indian engineer father and psychiatrist mother to Ohio.
“Faith, patriotism, hard work, family, these things have disappeared,” he says, and he wants to “fill that void with a vision of American national identity that dilutes this woke poison.”
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https://nypost.com/2023/05/03/vivek-ramaswamys-vision-is-america-first-even-more-than-trump/