Vivek Ramaswamy Blasted Trump as ‘Loser’ Who Tried to Overturn the Election Before Restyling Himself as Trump’s Biggest Toady

Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who emerged as a frequent guest on Fox News in the last few years before mounting a bid for the Republican nomination for president, came out with a strong statement in support of Donald Trump in the wake of his latest indictment.

A grand jury convened by Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with four felony crimes on Tuesday. The unsealed indictment reveals the shocking extent to which Trump and his allies fought to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.

In the wake of the charges, Ramaswamy issued a forceful condemnation of the prosecution. He argued Trump is not to blame for Jan. 6, when a mob of Trump’s supporters, duped by his claims the election was stolen, violently ransacked the Capitol, beat police and hunted elected officials. Instead, Ramaswamy argued that Twitter’s suppressing of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story was to blame.

“Donald Trump isn’t the cause of what happened on Jan 6,” Ramaswamy said. “The real cause was systematic and pervasive censorship of citizens in the year leading up to it. If you tell people they can’t speak, that’s when they scream.”

While Ramaswamy has fashioned himself as the biggest Trump booster in the Republican primary, an awkward position given Trump himself is running for president as well, his defenses of the former president have clashed with his previous condemnations.

For instance, in tweets following the Jan. 6 attack, Ramaswamy wrote: “What Trump did last week was wrong. Downright abhorrent. Plain and simple. I’ve said it before.”

In his 2022 book, Nation of Victims, Ramaswamy hammered Trump for his refusal to concede the election, calling him a “loser” and detailing how his efforts to overturn the election failed. His writing is eerily reminiscent of the latest indictment, which details Trump’s alarming efforts to remain in power despite losing the election.

Read the section of his book below, which was first flagged in a report by ABC News reporter Will Steakin:

It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again.

I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.

Conservatives have their own victimhood complexes these days; we are, after all, a nation of victims now. All that differs is whom we see as our oppressors. The worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen. Instead of distinguishing ourselves as the party that strives for excellence and rejects the easy path of victimhood narratives, we simply created our own.

I voted for Trump in 2020. I had some policy disagreements with him—for example, I disapproved of his large-scale government spending and his tariff policies—but I voted for him anyway because he refused to apologize for the things that make America great. Like many Americans, I hungered for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence in our nation. To me, that was something worth voting for. Donald Trump was, notwithstanding his shortcomings, the candidate who best embodied American greatness.

…

But while Trump promised to lead the nation to recommit itself to the pursuit of greatness, what he delivered in the end was just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican party whole.

When my candidate lost the election, I was dissatisfied, but I also felt a sense of peace. The election was done, and it was time to move on. No one likes a sore loser; that’s one of the worst victimhood complexes of all. Accepting the outcomes of elections and having a peaceful transition of power is part of what it means to be a constitutional republic: sometimes your team loses, but if you accept the result and prepare for the next election, eventually the scales will tip your way again. We fought, we lost, and I accepted the result.

So 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’s. She claimed voter suppression, he claimed voter fraud. He filed scores of lawsuits over various claims of fraud, as was his right, but they came nowhere close to changing the outcome in a single state, let alone the several swing states whose results he needed to overturn. In many cases, judges the president himself had nominated ruled against him, a sign of health in our nation’s institutions. Of the sixty-two lawsuits he and his supporters filed, he lost all but one, a minor victory in Pennsylvania that affected few votes. A Supreme Court with a strong conservative majority ruled against President Trump twice.

Top election officials in virtually every state, regardless of party, said they’d found no evidence of any significant level of fraud. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a statement saying “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history… There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. The president fired the agency’s director a few days later. In a call with Georgia’s secretary of state, the president implausibly claimed to have won every single state—something unprecedented in the nation’s history, and a sign that his claims weren’t grounded in fact.

Mike Pence, a man I have great respect for, decided it was his constitutional duty to resist the president’s attempts to get him to unilaterally overturn the results of the election, even in the face of the January 6 Capitol riot. Our institutions did hold, in the end. But they shouldn’t have been tested.

Like many Fox News hosts and Republican lawmakers who condemned the then-president in the aftermath of the riot, Ramaswamy soon fell in line as Trump’s hold over the Republican base proved resilient. Now, on the campaign trail, Ramaswamy has bound himself to Trump — a strategy that has fueled his rise in the polls.

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