by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Last night, Vivek Ramaswamy gave off serious Trump 2015 vibes and I think the MAGA base is going to eat it up. The thing about Vivek is he has managed to come up with a viable way to stake out a position as a placeholder, backup plan in case something happens to Trump and he can’t the Republican nominee.
The key issue is that Vivek has a very Trumpian vibe that DeSantis can’t pull off. As such, I suspect that Vivek is going to surge in the polls pretty quick to the point that I don’t know if DeSantis is even viable anymore.
The key issue is smug Twitter liberals don’t “get” what MAGA wants and so they totally miss that Vivek taps into the same populist rage that Trump has used to great success.
There is issue of race, of course. Given how fucking racist most of the MAGA base is, it does make you wonder if they can look past the fact that he’s not white and not Christian. And, yet, any study of history will tell you that generally history takes the most ironic path possible.
As such, yes, of course Vivek has a real possibility of being what DeSantis thought he was going to be — Trump without Trump. Vivek is young and smart and yet also gives the populist base all the fucking fascism they they expect in a presidential candidate.
Vivek seems well verse in all the paranoid, bizzaro talking points that the MAGA to the point that I just don’t see DeSantis being a viable candidate anymore. The key thing that seperates Vivek from DeSantis is Vivek has, well, some sort of personality. It may be grating, but at least it’s a personality.
DeSantis, meanwhile, just seems…there.
Anyway, I just don’t think we should underestimate the potential power of Vivek going forward. That’s my hot take for the moment, at least.
