From Trump to Vivek: Republicans are fixated on smooth talking phonies over policy

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What’s important about Ramaswamy is not his ideology—he has no coherent one—but how susceptible our political and media ecosystem is to a charismatic phony. He’s become a recurring character on cable news, recently claiming on CNN that he was misquoted in The Atlantic when raising questions about the 9/11 attacks. But The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson had the tape, which of course included Ramaswamy asking, “How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers?”

And yet, in the past, Ramaswamy has acknowledged that climate change is “real,” just one of his campaign flip-flops. On recognizing Juneteenth, for instance, he went from supportive—“Let it be a celebration of the American Dream itself,” he said on video—to against the holiday just two months later, telling?? Iowa voters,“Cancel Juneteenth or one of the other useless ones we made up.”

In Vivekmentum we see that Trumpism (or the con that is Trumpism) can in fact scale. Stuart Stevens, a former GOP operative who is firmly in the Never Trump camp, told me on the phone, “The party has become less educated and with that comes a higher susceptibility to conspiracy, fraud, and snake oil salesman.”

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