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July 22, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
15:20
Biden Drops Out ... Now What?
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We learned yesterday what I have been saying for about a year and a half.
Joe Biden is now officially not going to be the Democrat nominee for U.S. President.
The implications of this are far-reaching for a lot of different reasons.
One of them is how unsurprising this actually is.
We've known about Joe Biden's cognitive deficits for a very long time.
Why was it that it was the obvious public view that he was going to be the nominee, when in fact, the reality is he wasn't?
I said this at the presidential debate, the Republican debate, back in November of last year, and that was after six months of me saying the same thing, that Joe Biden would not be the nominee.
And I called on Democrats to at least be honest, so we could have a frank debate about who we're actually up against.
The reality is, I think this late switch is better for them than had they made the switch earlier, because whoever the new nominee is, they're pointing to Kamal Harris, I have my doubts whether it'll end up being her.
But whether it's Kamal or somebody else, when it's late in the cycle, the public's in a honeymoon phase with the new candidate, right when November comes around, without the scrutiny phase actually beginning.
And the reality is the much more honest approach would have been for the country and certainly for the Democratic Party, to be honest, that Joe Biden was not fit to be the President of the United States, let alone the President of the United States, over the course of the next four years, and have made that change before.
It's also fascinating to me that when I did say that at the Republican debate, it was dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
Anymore, we live in a country where when somebody's trying to silence the expression of an idea by calling it a conspiracy theory or anything else, the sad truth is often that means it's when we need to pay most attention.
Here's the number one lesson coming out of this swap and this bait-and-switch at the end of this process.
We're not actually running against a candidate here.
We're running against a machine.
That's a deep understanding of what's going on that requires rejecting some of the things you might otherwise think.
What if Biden wasn't going to let go?
This is one of the questions that people asked.
What would it have taken for Biden to have actually led the country or to have endorsed Harris?
That's missing the point.
It's not Biden that we were up against at all.
His cognitive deficits, and I would argue Kamala Harris's cognitive deficits, they're not a bug to the people who control them.
Those cognitive deficits are a feature.
It is a wheel that crushes the will of the manager, the managerial class crushing the will of everyday citizens, not just in the Republican Party, but even in the Democratic Party.
And I think that actually presents an opportunity for us.
It's a rare opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless to speak to those Democrats honestly and to say, you know what, Democrats, independents, people who might have voted once for Biden or for Hillary Clinton, you may not agree with everything that Donald Trump or the Republican Party says today, and that's fine.
No two Americans agree on 100% of policies.
That's a rarity.
But you do deserve a president and a party that at least tells you the truth, not just when it's easy, but when it's hard and when it's uncomfortable.
And I think this could be an opportunity in that sense for Republicans to win over many of those Democrats who may disagree more with Republican policies.
But even at their core, reject being lied to.
And that's exactly what's happened here.
Beyond just this individual game, whether it's Joe or whether it's Kamala, we got to realize the thing that we're actually solving for is defeating that machine, the rise of that managerial class, bigger than any other individual.
It embodies the philosophy of what the modern left is really about.
It's not about individual agency.
It's that collective will.
That's what this machine really is about.
The people we elect to run the government, be it Joe Biden, now they're trying for Kamala Harris or anybody else.
The people we elect to run the government are effectively not the ones who actually run the government anymore.
That's really what we're running against.
That's what we're running to defeat.
That's the system we're running to break.
That's what the deep state is really about.
This is about the unelected managerial, you could call them elites, you could call them bureaucrats, you could call them monarchs.
Who have no accountability to the people, but whose decisions are actually most impactful on how citizens live their lives.
Now, for my part, I am personally rooting for, and I think this should be true for all Republicans, that we're rooting for the Democrats to actually put up the best possible nominee that they can.
I know that might sound a little counterintuitive, but I think that'll be good for the country.
It'll be good for the Democratic Party.
I think it'll be good for the Republican Party, and it'll be good for the United States of America.
That forces us to say, you know what, whoever they put up, we're going to defeat them by offering our own vision of who we are and what we stand for.
You look at the last week, this is the stuff of American history told even centuries from now.
The near assassination of Donald Trump, followed by a historic Republican convention, followed by just a week later, he's back doing the exact same type of rally, sending a signal to the country that he's not going to buckle to fear only the next day.
For the current President of the United States, since 1968, we haven't seen something like this, refuse to accept the nomination of his own party, the Democrat Party's nomination.
This is going to be the stuff of history that we tell our children and our great-grandchildren.
But I think in that historical context, what's good for the country over the long run?
We should want the Democratic Party to put up the best possible ticket they can.
I'm not sure that they will or not, but that's what I'm rooting for as an American.
And if we stick to our own vision of who we are and what we actually stand for, we'll run and defeat them either way.
I say that as a citizen of this country who cares about the United States of America regardless of an individual party.
Just as a kid in a household has to know, here's the father figure in my house.
Here's the mother figure in my house.
Here are the people who lead my household.
You got to know, as a kid, it puts you in a much stronger position if you know this is my father, this is my mother, these are the leaders of the household and the family unit.
In that same way, I think citizens of a nation It requires some sense of who's the leader of a country.
It's not something that's on the front of your mind every day, but in the back of your mind and in your heart to know that you're grounded by a sense of conviction that somebody's actually leading the country.
That matters.
I think we require that.
That's a hole in our heart if that's missing.
I think it's the stuff of national decline if the people in a country don't have an emotional commitment to who the leader of their country actually is.
Yes, Joe Biden is nominally the President of the United States of America today.
But if you think about who is the leader of the country in the hearts of most people, and I think Tucker Carlson did a great job of making a similar case at the RNC in the last week.
The real person who most people now think of as the leader of the country who inspires them is actually Donald Trump.
A man who took the bullet, felt the blood, and stood right back up for the people of his country.
And that allows us to say, you know what, this is where we're going.
We don't have to be this nation led by a frail, really even mentally incapacitated U.S. president that reflects the vacuum of the moment we're in, but that we can be a nation that's actually proud of who we are and a nation that actually has a leader, even if it's not the current nominal president of the United States.
One of the questions I've gotten in the last 24 hours certainly is, how did you predict all of this, right?
I said over a year ago Biden wasn't going to be the nominee.
I said further that it was going to take place after the Republican convention.
This is exactly what the Democrats, I believe, want.
Have the vice president picked on the Republican ticket.
have the Republicans celebrate their victory on the back of that to be able to pull a bait-and-switch operation that actually takes a sprint to the finish line in November, confuse the public about what Republican policies are, and hope to win the election that way?
How did I manage to not only predict that, but even darker events that have played out over the course of the last week, over the last couple of weeks, You rewind back to the late part of the campaign trail when I was headed into the Iowa caucus, one of the things I said is that this is the same party that tried to take Donald Trump off the ballot, that sued him in civil suits, that then tried to bring criminal prosecution against him, that they were not going to let the man, one way or another, find his way to that Republican nomination.
That was my concern, certainly, last December and this January.
And it is shocking and it is saddening that we saw what happened Saturday before last to Donald Trump at that rally in Pennsylvania.
I think it was divine intervention.
It was divine providence that protected this country from that catastrophe.
But it's worth asking the question, how do you actually foretell the future?
I've been wrong about many predictions I've made too, but one of the things I do want to share, because I think this is useful, is forget the idea of predicting events in the future.
Forget the idea of theorizing what the media might dismiss as conspiracy theories.
Forget about all of that.
And I'd encourage you to just look at what are the incentives that guide actors, right?
What are the incentives that guide someone to behave the way they do, or a company to behave the way it does, or a political party to behave the way it does?
Add up the incentives, and that usually gives you a pretty clear picture of where someone's heading.
What is their incentive?
What do they solve for?
What are their behaviors actually telling you that they're doing?
This is a party and a movement on the Democrat side that has made it its core reason for existence to keep Donald Trump out of office.
They've tried every which way to stop him within the legal system and extra legally as well.
Think about the efforts to remove him from the ballot without going through even the legal system.
What they've learned is that has failed time and again.
In fact, every one of those have backfired to only make Donald Trump and the Republican Party more popular.
So now they're going to their last ditch tactic, which is this final bait and switch operation to say that you've effectively trained Republicans to train their criticism on Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket that's running the country today.
Well, if you make a bait and switch towards the very end, whoever replaces Biden, whether it's going to be Kamala Harris or anybody else, is in some manner going to be loved by the public.
It's a change.
It's the same feeling that a tortured prisoner might have towards his liberator.
That might be the feeling that the Democratic Party in much of this country has towards whoever replaces Biden.
The later that takes place, you're going to have a period of time where the public's going to fall in love without a scrutiny phase.
Their hope is November comes back around before the public even notices.
And you know what?
That might be the best strategy they have left.
The other strategy they're pairing with that, look at Kamala Harris's commentary over the weekend.
Claiming falsely that Donald Trump would sign a federal abortion ban into law, when in fact that has been a distinctive position that Donald Trump, along with other Republicans, including myself, when I ran for president, took that this is an issue for the states.
So that appears to be the new Democrat strategy.
Lie about what the GOP's position is.
Don't debate them on the merits.
Instead, just make the public think that the GOP's position is something other than what it is.
And to hide the ball on who your actual candidate is until as late in the process as possible.
Hopefully that creates one giant collective deflection that creates a last minute shift in energy and momentum.
And you know what?
They're rooting for the same pattern they got in 2018, 2020, and 2022, which is the illusion of a red wave that never comes.
Our job is to make sure they're not right about that.
History will unfold and we're going to decide, we're going to see what actually ends up unfolding for the United States.
But I'm rooting for something different here.
I'm rooting for a revival of not just the Republican Party, but the revival of our national values.
And that's how we get this done.
It's not by focusing on the shenanigans on the other side.
There's a temptation, a trap, to be pulled in and focused on what the Democrats' next move is.
Who's going to be the president or the vice president?
Who they're going to pair?
I think if it's Kamala Harris, a guy like Josh Shapiro is a likely VP. If it's not Kamala Harris, it's got to be somebody who checks those same identity politic boxes while rising above the party infighting.
I don't think someone like Michelle Obama is still off the table.
But the temptation is to focus our attention on that, rather than what's far more important, which is answering the question of who we are, not just as Republicans, who we are as Americans and what we stand for in this monumental moment in American history.
Do we believe the ideals of the American Revolution actually still exist, or don't we?
It's been said that sometimes, you know what, you may not have a country where people are willing to fight for those ideals.
I disagree with that.
The American Revolution was fought for ideals, and the way we're going to fight for those ideals today Is at the ballot box peacefully by reviving the ideals of 250 years ago.
Channel that energy in a positive way this time to do nothing more than to vote for the person who's going to make you more proud of being a citizen of this country.
To revive the ideals of free speech and open debate.
To say that's how we settle our differences in a constitutional republic.
not through the legal system or through force.
The basic idea that the people we elect to run the government should once again be the ones who actually run the government, not the shadow government in the unelected bureaucracy, both of the deep state in Washington, D.C., and the managerial class of, say, the modern Democratic Party.
The idea of merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their race and gender.
Ask yourself honestly, do you think that's why Kamala Harris got the job because of merit overshadowed?
Of course she didn't.
It was on the basis of a modern group identity fixation that has really lost the essence of this country.
Merit, free speech, self-governance, the rule of law.
These are the basic ideals that bind us together across our skin-deep differences, even across our partisan differences.
And this is a rare moment in American history that we have.
We live in a historic time.
The events that have unfolded over the last week and a half are unlike those we have seen in my lifetime.
We have an opportunity in this historic moment to revive those historic ideals.
And if we do, you know what?
It doesn't matter which puppet the Democrats put up next.
The temptations to focus on that, that's a trap.
Avoid that trap and instead redirect that attention to actually define our ideals, why we believe in those ideals, and why we still are committed to them as we were in 1776. And I think if we do, 2024 will mark the year where we turn the page on a toxic chapter of our national history.
We saw the desire for that at the Republican convention last week.
It was a unique convention.
It was a convention of not just unity within a party, but a hunger for national unity as well.
And that's the kind of national unity I actually want.
Not some fake artificial astroturf kind, but the real thing.
Grounded in a country where, yes, we will deeply have our disagreements.
But nonetheless, in spite of those disagreements, we're still committed to giving every American the chance to express their views.
That's part of who we are, and I think that's how we're going to save this country, not by focusing on the political horse race antics that might be the temptation in the wake of news of the kind we had yesterday.
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