When Three Ex-Democrats Take On the Machine | Vivek Ramaswamy

You spent a lot of time on your presidential campaign, which was quite successful, all things considered, given how relatively unknown you were as a political actor and the complexities of the current political situation. I'm very curious about the consequences of that. I mean, I did note that there was a fair amount of—

I'm wondering what your relationship is with the powers that be on the Republican side at the moment. I mean, we've seen Trump make some remarkably interesting moves in the past few weeks. I mean, the fact that he's aligned himself with Tulsi Gabbard and RFK and, by all appearances, Elon Musk, who agreed yesterday to head something like a commission on governmental efficiency. This radicalness of this can hardly be overstated, right? I mean, RFK wants to rekindle or reformulate the health and food distribution systems. I mean, that's a major undertaking, and I think he's absolutely right about the health crisis that besets us. I mean, obesity and diabetes are a plague of such catastrophic proportions that they make any risk from climate change appear absolutely trivial by comparison—insanely trivial.

But it's radical, and well, Elon Musk is a radical sort of character, and Tulsi Gabbard again—she fits the same descriptive terminology. It's also interesting that all three of those people are ex-Democrats. You could also say about Trump, you know, it's not like Trump is the world's most obvious conservative; quite the contrary.

So, I'm curious about what you make of what's happening around Trump at the moment and around Kamala Harris too for that matter, because there's also evidence that her stance has become substantially less radical and more conservative. Now, you can be skeptical and cynical, and maybe you should be about how much of that's just surface; but the Democrats did shut out the radical leftists at the convention to a large degree, and much of what Harris has been pushing is much more mainstream Democrat than you might have expected. For example, if people like AOC or Rashida Tlaib had got the upper hand—the real radicals in the Democratic party.

So, what do you make of what's happening around Trump? How do you feel about it? What potential role are you playing, and might you play in the future in relation to that? What do you have to say about what's happening with Kamala Harris and the reconfiguration of the Democrats?

Well, look, everything you just laid out, I think, accentuates an increasingly obvious truth, which is that the real divide in this country is not between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, as those words have become less meaningful. You have multiple former Democrats who you named—Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK—and by the way, somebody who formerly identifies as Democrat as well was Donald Trump. Now, looking at the world in a very different way.

On the other hand, Kamala Harris, in her sprint—it's not even a gradual run; it's a sprint toward the center of traditional political content. What we're actually seeing is a different divide; it is a divide between the managerial class and the everyday citizen. So, I'll start with Kamala for a second here.

I don't think the right spot-on critique of Kamala is that she's a communist, right? The policies she's advocated for in the past certainly would vindicate that characterization. She favors taxes on unreal capital gains, a single-payer healthcare system. She has favored bans on fracking, bans on offshore drilling. She was a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal so much so that she wanted to end the filibuster. If we go straight down the list of that history—and I've done that in other places—but as you say, right now, sincerely or not, those are not the views that she's espousing at the moment for the most part.

So, it's less that she is a communist or a socialist. I think that's almost giving her too much credit. I think that gives her the credit of being an ideologue, which I don't think she is. I don't think she's particularly ideological. I think she, like Biden—as Biden proved to be anyway—is really just another cog in a machine.

I think that this is part of—I think the more Republicans see ourselves running against a candidate—and to say that that candidate, Joe Biden. You know, when I ran for U.S. president, right, the pledge we had to sign to be on the debate stage was called the Beat Biden pledge. I told the then-chairwoman of the Republican Party that I thought this was a silly idea because we're not running against Joe Biden. So, why are we framing our entire Republican primary endeavor in the context of beating Joe Biden?

In the very practical sense, I didn't think we were going to run against Joe Biden. We're not. But even in the deeper philosophical sense, why don't we focus on what alternative vision we actually have to offer to the people? So, I think that's a trap that Republicans would fall into.

Now, again with Kamala, to say that, okay, here's everything that's wrong with Kamala Harris when, in fact, that misses the point—she's just another cog in the system. We're not running against a candidate; we're running against a machine. And I think we have to understand that. So, that is where I think you see a lot of the common threads between folks like, you know, myself, to RFK, to Donald Trump, to Tulsi. We have divergences between us, too, other more historically traditional Republican conservatives.

There'll be shades of difference on individual policy questions on the merits of one form of, you know, regulation or policymaking or other. But what we do represent, in sheer commonality, is a hostility to the managerial class—the managerial administration of America—by, I would say, people who are never elected to their positions. The people we elect to run the government, from Kamala Harris to Joe Biden, or anybody else, they're not the ones actually running the government. It is a managerial machine of which they're just a part. That really is the divide, and I think that's what we're seeing in that changing landscape.

It's also strange—it's so strange—that it's the conservative Republicans that have found themselves in opposition to the managerial class because, logically, it should be that the conservatives are the supporters of the managerial administrative class. I think there have been points in history where that's been true, no doubt about it. But I think that that's where, you know, these words change their valence and meaning over time.

Yeah, right. You know, the managerial class—I don't use the term the elites really as much as some of my other friends on the right do because I think that I’m an elite. Elon Musk is an elite, you know, by certain definitions. Founders, I think there's a different categorization I would offer between the everyday citizen, the creators, and then this managerial intermediary class—the bureaucrat class, the committee class.

I think there's always a balance of power between all three, and maybe some element of all three is always required in any well-functioning society. But right now, we live in a moment where that balance of power has shifted too heavily in favor of the managerial committee class—not just in government, but in universities and companies, in nonprofits, in any institution.

I think now is a moment we live in where creators are able to ally with everyday citizens to be able to drive real change. And so that's—I’m a creator by background; that's what led me to run for U.S. president. Donald Trump, Elon Musk—very similar backgrounds as creators who are allied with the everyday citizen to overthrow, in some sense, the managerial class that has a lot of our modern culture, and certainly our modern government, in a chokehold.

And so that's what motivated me to run in the first place. I think it's a common thread that you could connect for some of the other characters you just mentioned.

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You know, for my part—look, I've enjoyed my presidential run immensely. I was the experience of a lifetime. I grew in ways that I would not have but for doing that. One thing I do believe in, you know, for all the things that I could blame for why I didn't achieve the ultimate goal, I'm grateful that I—as somebody who was relatively unknown at the start of it—I beat multiple former and current senators and governors and a former vice president along the way, and so I'm satisfied with how we did.

But at the same time, I didn't achieve the goal of assuming the presidency, and I tell my kids the same thing. So, I'll follow the advice myself: the number one factor that is most determinative of what you achieve in life is you. It's not the only factor that matters, but it's the number one factor.

There are some things that I think I could have done better. I think a lot of my former colleagues, people I've worked with, employees of mine, close friends, family members—I think one of the things that they were most frustrated by, they tell me this—and I appreciate that—is that they're frustrated that they feel like the public did not get to see the full me that they know, right?

I think that part of what happened in the process of running for president—and it was unavoidable this time around—and I don't say I have any regrets considering the result that I achieved. But, you know, if I was to still take some reflections and learnings from it, I took the approach that if you hit me, I'm going to hit you back ten times harder. I don't care if you're a Republican or Democrat; that was just my approach.

Because I had been in a position where, in the world of business, it doesn't happen to you in quite the same way. But when I started to become ascendant, it was a level of attack—a deeply personal attack on me from ten different angles—that the way I dealt with it was to say, "Well, I will one by one hit you back ten times harder and that's how I'm going to do this."

That is part of me; I’m a fighter, I'm a competitor. But it's not all of me. I think that one of the challenges—but if you're going to lead the free world, you better be up for that challenge at the highest level—is to show the people that you are a fighter while also finding ways to let 300 million people who don't otherwise know you get to know what's in your heart beyond just your ability to fight.

That is, I think, where I left some room on the table over the campaign that I think is probably one of my great learnings.