By
Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday,
June 14, 2023
Some
people have been skeptical about the presence of motivational speaker/venture
capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race. My
colleague Charlie Cooke cruelly accused him of “not really
running for president.”
An even less reputable writer irresponsibly declared that he had “voluntarily
enserfed himself” to
Donald Trump, which is the sort of tasteless language that I’m glad National Review no longer
tolerates.
And with
good reason, because Vivek Ramaswamy has proven himself worthy of his candidacy
with a truly selfless act: He has called upon all of Donald Trump’s other
opponents to sign a promise
to pardon Trump of all his crimes regardless of guilt or innocence if they win
office. Some
opponents of the former president might have taken a combative position in
regard to his indictment on 37 counts of stealing and withholding national
secrets and more; others might sit on the fence. Yet here Ramaswamy is, with
such surpassing grace and magnanimity, asking the entire field to sign his
petition to give Trump a blank check. You just have to tip your cap to such a
classy opponent.
But only
so far. My primary criticism of Ramaswamy here is that he lacked the courage to
go further. Committing to pardoning Trump before the facts have even been
litigated is easy; anybody can do that. Heck, look at Gerald Ford: He not only
pardoned Nixon, he went on to beat some forgotten loser in his
primary afterwards. Aren’t you a bolder patriot than that hack RINO
swamp creature Gerald Ford? The lack of commitment is alarming. Are
you really on the team, Vivek? Then you have to prove yourself. Charlie Kirk
made a far braver appeal to the persuasive power of self-immolatory protest
when he demanded that all candidates other than Donald Trump simply suspend their
campaigns in solidarity with him.
Neither
choice goes remotely far enough. Ann Coulter was definitely onto something when
she suggested that all Republicans commit suicide to signal their devotion to
the cause (“otherwise, we don’t have a country, folks”), but that’s a waste of
manpower — look, the national vote was bad enough for Republicans in 2020, we
don’t have much of a margin for error here. Instead, we should only cull what’s
necessary to prove our superior virtue: The other Republican candidates must agree
to ritually off themselves.
It’s the
only answer that makes any sense. There can be only one, after all. And there’s
no reason to not be creative about it, either — sorry, Chris Christie, you
bought the ticket, and now you’re gonna have to take the ride. My first thought
was something along the lines of a Mesoamerican blood-sacrifice ritual to
appease the angry Deep State Gods (imagine Apocalypto, but with
Alex Bruesewitz holding Mike Pence’s still-twitching heart aloft in his hands
to get Judge Cannon to dismiss the Trump indictment). But there are even
more-fitting historical antecedents out there: Goujian (496–465 b.c.) of
the Yue kingdom in China used to intimidate opposing armies by having his
front-line soldiers spontaneously behead themselves before battle as a
demonstration of fearlessness. Why not draft the rest of the Republican
presidential field into making a similarly heroic gesture? At the very least,
we may end up learning something about the kind of man Doug Burgum is (was).
Give due
credit to Coulter for “knowing what time it is” and immediately recognizing
people such as Kirk and Ramaswamy for being insufficiently devoted to the
cause. It’s up to the rest of us to prove ourselves worthy of the Trump 2024
campaign, however, and now it’s our turn to push to make Vivek’s dream a
reality.
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