On its face, there wasn’t anything unusual about the email that landed last week in the press office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Call it creative destruction, political chaos, or a bit of both, but Vivek Ramaswamy now threatens war with the Republican National Committee. The biotech-entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate is demanding RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel release criteria for qualifying for the primary debates – or else.
The clarion call to “build the wall” is no longer enough. Each of the declared Republican candidates for president tell RealClearPolitics that Mexican drug cartels must be designated as foreign terrorist organizations. It is the newest populist orthodoxy, one that the Biden administration flatly rejects.
Vivek Ramaswamy wants to do something normal politicians work to avoid. A successful biotech entrepreneur turned “anti-woke” reformer, the Republican author and activist is running for president while actively trying to break the fourth wall of American campaign politics.
In January 2022, on his first day in office, Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, showed race antagonists the schoolhouse door. During the campaign, Youngkin had promised voters he would end what he called the “Inherently Divisive Policies, Programs, Training, and Curricula” centered on race. Conservative parents had been protesting ideologically charged “antiracism” training in schools across the state. A year later, the conflicts born of “Critical Race Theory” are still playing out in Virginia schools.
Return him to the White House, and Donald Trump promised to deliver global peace and domestic harmony. Deny him a second term, and the United States would become “a failed country,” a nation “that no one will even recognize – a lawless, open-borders, crime-ridden, filthy communist nightmare.”
The West is unprepared for everything all at once.
“You can smile,” President Biden assured Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
A year ago, Boris Johnson made people jittery by reporting that Vladimir Putin threatened to fire a missile at him in the runup to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He apparently is no longer worried. Johnson is no longer prime minister of the U.K., and this week he basked in the safety of the United States.
