Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy (9 August 1985-) was an American entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate in 2024. Ramaswamy ran on a libertarian platform that included radical reforms such as abolishing the FBI, IRS, and Department of Education, raising the voting age to 25 unless youths from 18 to 24 took and passed the civics test given to immigrants before naturalization, and pursuing a "Cold War realist" and isolationist foreign policy.
Biography[]
Vivek Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Tamil immigrant parents from Kerala, India. The son of an engineer, Ramaswamy stuied biology at Harvard; his political views were shaped by his conservative Christian piano teacher, and he gained a reputation as a libertarian at Harvard. He founded Roivant Sciences in 2014, and he attempted to market intepirdine as an Alzheimer's drug, only for the drug to fail in its large clinical trial in 2017. While the compoany failed, Ramaswamy made $175 million in capital gains from his company's sale to Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma in 2019, and he came to have a net worth of $630 million by April 2023 due to his involvement in both the biotech and financial businesses.
Ramaswamy voted for the Libertarian Party at the 2004 presidential election and did not vote in the 2008, 2012, or 2016 elections, only to support Republican Donald Trump in 2020. He considered running in the 2022 US Senate election on Ohio before declaring his candidacy for president of the United States on 21 February 2023, publicly releasing 20 years of his individual income tax returns before self-financing a campaign that gained speed in August 2023 as Ramaswamy rapped at the Iowa caucus and shared his radical ideals. Ramaswamy identified as an "unapologetic American nationalist," and he said that he shared the foundational Judeo-Christian values on which America was built, as well as belief in one God. Ramaswamy's platform was libertarian-conservative; he promised to pardon Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Trump, argued that identity politics should be replaced by meritocracy, called affirmative action the "single biggest form of institutionalized racism in America today," supported six-week abortion bans at the state level (while opposing a federal ban), supported abolishing the Department of Education, FBI, and IRS by executive order, pledged to fire half the federal workforce and establish eight-year term limits for all government employees, supported raising the voting age to 25 unless young people aged 18 to 24 could either pass a civics test equivalent to one taken by immigrants or serve in the military or as first responders, supported establishing Election Day as a federal holiday, supported Voter ID, supported using the US Army to annihilateMexican drug cartels, favored a peaceful resolution to the Russo-Ukrainian War in which Ukraine would make concessions to Russia and Russia would break its alliance in China (he called Volodymyr Zelensky a "fraud" and "bully", and said that he believed that Vladimir Putin could be counted on to act in his self interest), opposed NATO membership for Ukraine, supported vigorously protecting Taiwan from China until the USA could transition towards semiconductor independence after 2028 (after which he argued that a "Chinese Civil War" would not be the business of the USA), supported drilling, fracking, and burning coal to grow the economy, rejected the "climate cult," and opposed subsidies for electric vehicles.