Upstart Republican primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sought to explain his past criticism of Donald Trump on Sunday following a debate performance this week in which he praised the former president as the greatest commander-in-chief of the last century.
Mr Ramaswamy appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday where he was asked by host Chuck Todd about his books Nation of Victims. Published last year, it is being viewed as a defacto manifesto for Mr Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur.
Mr Todd asked about one key passage from the book where Mr Ramaswamy appeared to swipe at candidates, like Mr Trump, who couldn’t accept defeat on election day.
“’No one likes a sore loser’,” Todd said, reading from the book. “’That’s one of the worst victimhood complexes of all.’ Are you referring to Donald Trump?”
Mr Ramaswamy replied: “I referred in that chapter both to Stacy Abrams and to Donald Trump.”
The passage from Nation of Victims highlighted by Todd was not the extend of Mr Ramaswamy’s criticism in the book. He would go on in the same chapter to describe how “a victimhood culture that started on the left in this country” would spread to the Republican Party under the guise of Mr Trump and his baseless insistence that his defeat was the result of election fraud.
“I was especially disappointed when I saw President Trump take a page from the Stacey Abrams playbook. His claims were just as weak as Abrams’,” Mr Ramaswamy wrote in the book.
Mr Ramaswamy also blamed Mr Trump in the book for delivering “just another tale of grievance” after making bold promises to the conservative movement.
Ms Abrams, a Democrat who ran for governor in Georgia in 2018, narrowly lost the election that year to the state’s current governor, Brian Kemp.
She had argued that purges of names from state voter rolls initiated by the Republican-controlled state government effectively served as a form of voter suppression during her bid for office.
A group she went on to found, Fair Fight Action, later challenged those practices in federal court on constitutional grounds but was defeated.
Mr Ramaswamy delivered a provocative, headline-grabbing performance on the GOP debate stage this past week in Milwaukee.
He used the stage to lavishly praise Mr Trump referring to him as “the best president of the 21st century”.
That comment earned reciprocal praise from the GOP frontrunner, who declared that his rival had secured “a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH” in a Truth Social posting.
While Mr Ramaswamy had some breakout moments during the debate that earned him cheers from the crowd and declarations of victory from his supporters on Twitter, he also found himself firmly in the crosshairs of rivals like ex-Governor Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence.
