Vivek Ramaswamy started the third GOP presidential debate with a barrage of back-to-back crazy remarks: leaving no one unscathed, not Biden, not the GOP, not even the Republican National Committee’s chair.
Before the debate, Republican candidate Ramaswamy “promised earlier in the night that he would ‘be unhinged,'” reported Axios , a promise he kept admirably, according to ABC News White House Correspondent Mary Alice Parks.
Ramaswamy has long portrayed himself as being very different from the established GOP and exploited the party’s recent electoral setbacks as grounds for institutional reform. “I am upset about what happened last night,” he said, aiming for the RNC chief. “We’ve become a party of losers. There’s a cancer in the Republican establishment. Let’s speak the truth. Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC, we have lost.”
“We got trounced last night,” he continued, “and I think we have to have accountability. For that matter, Ronna, if you want to come on stage tonight and look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will turn over, yield my time to you,” he said, slamming McDaniel. Later that evening, after leaving the debate stage, he seemed to get into a furious argument with McDaniel.
Wow… Vivek Ramaswamy just went absolute savage mode on the RNC, calling out Ronna by name, and then NBC, flipping the moderator question back onto the moderator. Has this ever been done? pic.twitter.com/Hmdo7o5oY5
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 9, 2023
The snide comment was made less than five minutes into the third GOP debate, which had just five candidates and was anchored by NBC News in Miami. Trump was conspicuously absent, opting not to take part for the third time in a row.
Trump has maintained on numerous occasions that he is confident he will secure the party’s nomination and does not feel the need to debate his Republican opponents. Trump is not far from the truth. 56% of Republicans worldwide said that Trump is their favored candidate, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted last month. DeSantis is the next closest rival with 16%, followed by Haley with 9%. It was merely 2% in support of Ramaswamy.
My message to the Democrat Party: End this farce that Joe Biden is going to be your nominee – he’s not even the President of the United States – he’s a puppet for the managerial class. He should step aside & end his candidacy now. pic.twitter.com/GWNuQ6xPX9
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) November 9, 2023
Ramaswamy unexpectedly turned the tables on the debate moderators during his speech, criticizing Kristen Welker of NBC News’s Meet the Press for promoting what he called “the Trump/Russia collusion hoax,” per Yahoo! News.
“This should be Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk,” he said. “We’d have 10 times the viewership, asking questions that GOP primary voters care about and bringing people we want into our party.” Welker laughed and simply smiled in response.
Ramaswamy asserted, “This is how we get our country back,” and alleged that the media had “rigged” the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections—claims that have since been refuted as baseless, per USA TODAY . “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its partners said in a November 2020 statement. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes changed votes or was in any way compromised.”