Vivek Ramaswamy’s 15 minutes are here: His surge of support shows all the GOP base wants is trolling

When talking about businessman Vivek Ramaswamy’s performance at Wednesday night’s debut Republican presidential primary, the adjectives that burbled up in both press and social media chatter were not what one would traditionally consider flattering: Annoying. Irritating. Glib. It was the consensus view among serious people that the guy is a jackass. It wasn’t just liberals on MSNBC rolling their eyes at a man who was as smug as he was stupid. The other Republicans on the stage seemed genuinely miffed at his presence. This means that Ramaswamy had a banner night with the people he was trying to reach: The MAGA audience.

Obviously, he won’t be replacing Donald Trump in their hearts, nor does he have any interest in trying, but for the redhat crowd, all that matters is “triggering the liberals,” a group so widely defined it now encompasses not just Democrats but any Republican who still believes in quaint ideas like basic decency. We should be grateful that Ramaswamy’s method was merely to act like an overcaffeinated version of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex. In 2027, the attention-seeking trolls that worm their way on the debate stage may have to escalate to flashing their genitals and heiling Hitler to garner that sweet, sweet outrage that is the nectar MAGA feeds upon.

Because he talks fast and radiates “debate me, bro” energy, Ramaswamy has been dutifully described as “smart” by the GOP voters telling journalists why they like the guy. Anyone who actually listens to the content of his rhetoric, however, notices right away that he sounds like a thudding idiot. For one thing, there are his conspiracy theories, from declaring that “the climate change agenda is a hoax” during the debate to his unsubtle hinting at 9/11 myths on the campaign trail. His supposed “policy” ideas, meanwhile, seem recycled from the gibberish of right-wing memes. And, of course, the average 3rd grader has a better understanding of history, which is especially rich since one of Ramaswamy’s “proposals” is requiring a civics test of voters under 25.

Of course, he contradicts himself constantly, saying one thing and then denying he said it the next minute. The Washington Post gently described all this as “contradictory image and statements.” I would call it “contempt for reality.” As the GOP debate Wednesday showed, Ramaswamy’s tendency to couple fatuousness with supreme confidence makes it irresistible for people on both the left and right to use up some of their short, precious lives by “correcting” his many, many dumb statements. He even got yelled at by Republicans on the debate stage for talking out of his ass, and that’s a crowd that has a strong tolerance for high arrogance/low information rhetoric.

But, as Ramaswamy’s grinning during that debate suggested, there’s nothing sincere about the performative moronics. Everything out of his mouth, from 9/11 conspiracy theories to Trump pardon talk, must be understood as bait. Like a cat throwing your stuff off a shelf, all that matters is getting a reaction. Every time he’s “called out,” Ramaswamy and his growing audience are high-fiving each other. They achieved the goal of getting under the skin of “elites,” a group defined not by money or status — Ramaswamy has both — but mainly as people who read books.

That’s why the only rejoinder during the debate that stung even a little was when former Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., called Ramaswamy “ChatGPT.” Because yes, Ramaswamy’s mile-a-minute right-wing nuttery sounds exactly what you’d get if you asked language learning software to recreate the comment section of Breitbart. It doesn’t make sense and isn’t meant to make sense. Trying to be coherent just gets in the way of the goal, which is trolling.

Indeed, Christie’s own residual longing for intelligibility ended up mucking up his own otherwise sick burn of Ramaswamy. After the ChatGPT crack, Christie immediately went after the younger man for plagiarizing Barack Obama’s famous 2004 self-description as a “skinny kid with a funny name” during the debate. Christie certainly seemed to feel good about himself, but in truth, he walked right into a trap. I have little doubt Ramaswamy was hoping people noticed he swiped Obama’s line, and Christie was on hand to make sure they didn’t miss it. Appropriating Obama’s joke was another troll stunt, an attempt to tarnish a beloved historical moment by rubbing MAGA goo all over it. But of course, the effort is wasted if people don’t see what he’s doing.

What decent people struggle to understand is that it’s all by design when people like Ramaswamy thumb their noses at consistency, rationality, and factual reality. Good people respect these things, believing society works better if there’s a shared respect for reason. But for trolls like Ramaswamy — and Trump — not making sense is the point. As never-Trump Republican pollster Sarah Longwell told “Pod Save America” after the debate, Ramaswamy is a “chaos agent” that appeals to the Trump base “that likes insane people.”

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Just look no further than Trump’s supposed counterprogramming to the debate, an interview with Tucker Carlson that was rolled out on Twitter. It was 45 minutes of indecipherable babbling, a black hole of despair for people who want words to mean things. As Maggie Haberman of the New York Times wrote, it was “mostly stream-of-consciousness commentary on politics and the state of the nation, drifting from topics such as the death of Jeffrey Epstein and the challenges of low water pressure to what President Biden’s legs look like on the beach.” The clips I saw were reminiscent of being cornered at a party by someone high on cocaine. But Trump’s fans don’t care and probably didn’t watch anyway. Trump’s word salad is taken as a dominance play, a demonstration that he is too powerful to be constrained by concerns of coherence.

What the MAGA base gets out of this is pathetic but not mysterious.

“Neener neener, look at these nerds who care,” is a cheap way to feel superior. It’s the revenge of the mediocre, to paint sincere concern about the world as sanctimony. The irony of this is that the audience is so caught up in the theatrics of trolling that they don’t notice that they’re the actual marks in this particular con job. Neither Trump nor Ramaswamy have any respect for the MAGA fools who fall for their trolling-the-libs-and-RINOs act. They just see a bunch of rubes who are easily manipulated into handing over their money. And both would know how to zone in on easy-to-grift victims, since before politics, they made their way through the world through shady business tactics.

Trump’s mistake was in actually winning the nomination and presidency. Real power is dangerous for a sociopathic con man because, as we saw in the attempted coup, they get it into their head they can defraud the nation like they defraud their foolish followers. So far, Ramaswamy seems to have more modest goals, mainly being the next Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens, shameless hucksters who make a killing by selling validation to bigots.

Of course, that makes it also hard for everyone outside the MAGA bubble to get too upset by the right-wing propaganda scam. Who cares if some cynical demagogues part foolhardy bigots from their money? But the process is ramping up hatred and tearing at the fabric of democracy, so alas, we are forced to care. But we could do a little better at not taking the bait. Call out the game — the “ChatGPT” swipe was a good one for that — without getting mired into arguing over arguments the trolls themselves don’t even believe in.

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