With the spotlight for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination squarely on former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has yet to declare his candidacy, Vivek Ramaswamy told Newsmax on Monday night he likes the spot his campaign is in, even if some polls show him trailing Trump and DeSantis by wide margins.
"I look at where I am in this race is about where Trump was when he came down the escalator in June of 2015," Ramaswamy told "Eric Bolling The Balance." "I was in Iowa just last weekend, and I can tell you Republicans are hungry for an outsider, and I think we need an outsider to actually get the job done in the White House.
"If you want to dismantle the administrative state, the managerial bureaucracy that actually runs the show today, it's going to have to be done by somebody who wasn't a product of that same political system."
Ramaswamy, a 37-year-old multimillionaire biotech engineer from Ohio who has denounced "woke" corporations, said that would make the fight for the Republican nomination in a two-horse race between himself and Trump. Ramaswamy said even though DeSantis is a governor, he doesn’t view him as an outsider but a "professional politician."
"I think most people who have been in or who are thinking about entering this race or in this race are career professional politicians," said Ramaswamy, who along with Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley are the only Republicans who have entered the race in what is expected to be a crowded field. "Trump came in as an outsider in 2015. I'm coming as an outsider in this race, and I think that one of the things you're going have to say is, Donald Trump and I are in a different category where we're not beholden to a donor class."
Ramaswamy said he intends to go even further than Trump regarding an American-first agenda because it is backed by a strong moral foundation.
"It's one of the reasons I respect Ronald Reagan, and I do think we're at one of these defining points in American history," he said. "In the late 1970s, the country was in a national identity crisis. Reagan led us out of it. That's what I plan to do in 2024.
"I think we can actually deliver a landslide election if we answer the question of what it means to be American and revive those values, from meritocracy to free speech to actually democratic self-governance over aristocracy. Let's rally around those values. That's what I think we can do in this election."
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