This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
Standing outside Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum during the Republican National Convention last summer offered an ideal vantage point on the MAGA hierarchy. In one direction, Ben Carson muttered into his phone, avoiding questions from reporters. In another, Sebastian Gorka strained to smile for selfies while people clamored around him. Jeanine Pirro came and went, her hair still full of curlers. But among all of them, few drew as much attention and adulation as Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy’s star power was real. If it seemed like the Republican primary electorate had swiftly dismissed the 39-year-old mogul–turned–politician’s candidacy for president, it was plain in Wisconsin that he had made an enduring impression. People swarmed him wherever he went. And that’s what’s made the horrific past couple weeks for Ramaswamy all the more remarkable—a stark warning for supposed rising stars in the new Trump administration.
When I first caught a glimpse of Ramaswamy at the RNC, he was mostly out of view, sitting for a podcast interview on a makeshift stage just outside the arena. I wouldn’t have noticed him if not for a single fan, Maggie, a delegate from North Carolina who had been engaged in Republican politics for nearly two decades. She gazed at him with the kind of reverence I’d have thought was reserved for sitting presidents.
“It’s his strong conservative ideals, his ability to articulate them well, and his ability to fire up an audience,” she told me. Minutes later, Ramaswamy descended from the stage, greeted Maggie warmly, and was immediately engulfed by a huddle of fans and reporters. He conjured a crowd out of thin air. Maggie introduced me to him as a “friendly gentleman,” and suddenly I was face-to-face with the man everyone apparently wanted to see.
I asked Ramaswamy if he felt passed over for vice president. With practiced ease, he praised J.D. Vance, and repeated an answer I’d seen elsewhere about their shared history growing up near each other in Ohio and watching Bengals games together when they were in law school. I asked him what he made of the crowds that followed him around the convention. “To a fault, I’ll share with you what’s on my mind,” Ramaswamy said. “People are tired of being talked to through filters. I think people are hungry for an authenticity we’ve been missing in politics for a while. I felt the force of it during the campaign. It’s difficult because you do make tradeoffs if you’re going to share something inconvenient with donors or the media, but I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.
I thought about the “inconvenient” line as Ramaswamy has managed to chase himself out of Trump World, starting with a broadside the day after Christmas in which he declared American culture beholden to the lazy and explained why foreign-born and first-generation workers are often viewed as superior by big companies. Ramaswamy had been riding high as a named co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, alongside Elon Musk, where hiring has been as brisk as the reports about his potential conflicts of interest. Then, fatefully, he decided to share what was on his mind.
“A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or “Stefan” over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote. He argued Americans who felt left behind should stop “wallowing in victimhood” and work harder. “Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.”
Ramaswamy’s words came amid fights over H-1B skilled worker visas, which Musk had publicly championed to considerable MAGA backlash. Trump backed Musk, and the fighting over the visas continued, but both men seemed to shake off the controversy. It has stuck to Ramaswamy in a different way. He has been AWOL since the comments, keeping quiet online and a low profile generally. Was it that he dissed Cory from Boy Meets World, who really did not need to be in this conversation? Was it that he was a brown guy implicitly telling white, blue-collar Trump voters that they only have themselves to blame for their economic troubles?
I have a guess. Either way, Ramaswamy has found himself in an unexpected moment of exile as Trump takes office. He tried to clarify his comments and call for an end to H-1B visas, saying “the system is broken and needs to be fixed” and framing it as “a form of indentured servitude.” But then headlines emerged suggesting Trump has been pressuring Ramaswamy to accept a potential appointment to Vance’s empty Senate seat in Ohio, a job he previously said didn’t interest him. (Last week, he met with Gov. Mike DeWine, who ultimately appointed Jon Husted, Ohio’s lieutenant governor, to the seat on Friday.) Late last week, Ramaswamy signaled he would run for governor of Ohio, but later over the holiday weekend, the real news dropped: He would now not be involved at DOGE, where he had, according to one Trump World gossip, “worn out his welcome.” You don’t say?
As I watched Ramaswamy move through the swelling crowd at the RNC, signing autographs and shaking hands, it was clear that he adored the spotlight; he seemed to have a little moment with every last person who gathered around him. Now, before Trump even took office, he has seen how hard that spotlight can bite back. The “truth” Ramaswamy had to tell wasn’t one that MAGA world wanted to hear. Despite his rapid rise and undeniable stardom, he never quite grasped who drove this movement into power. It was not the Screeches of the world. It was more often the Zacks and Slaters who, a few decades on, don’t understand why their lives don’t look how they expected them to.
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