Back Back Vivek Ramaswamy Drops Out of GOP Presidential Race, Endorses Trump

Having failed to sell himself as a next-generation version of former President Donald Trump, Ramaswamy endorsed Trump as he left the contest.

“We did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight,” Ramaswamy told supporters in Iowa. He added: “There is no path for me to be the next president absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country.”

Looking forward, Ramaswamy said he had called Trump and that the former president has his full backing. “I’m going to ask you to follow me and take our America First movement to the next level,” he said.

The 38-year-old son of Indian immigrants campaigned with a strong disdain for identity politics and focused heavily on his opposition to business efforts to advance political, social and environmental causes, while also selling himself as an outsider and government skeptic.

He echoed Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric and called his policy agenda “America First 2.0,” following the nationalist slogan the former president adopted in his 2017 presidential inauguration speech. After earning a biology degree from Harvard University and a law degree from Yale University, Ramaswamy made his fortune as a hedge-fund investor who bought undervalued pharmaceutical stocks that later skyrocketed. He founded a biotech startup now valued at $9 billion, called Roivant Sciences, to advance drugs that big drugmakers deprioritized.

Ramaswamy has lent his campaign significant amounts from his own fortune. Securities and Exchange Commission filings show that Ramaswamy recently sold more than $33 million worth of stock in the biotech company he founded. He said just days before Iowa that he would be in the presidential race “until the very end.”

As his campaign progressed, Ramaswamy focused on floating conspiracy theories on a variety of topics. In a recent ad, he asserted that the media and other forces were working to keep him from telling the truth about “what really happened” during the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol, among other subjects. Ramaswamy is unlikely to fade completely from conservative politics. While he has never held elective office or worked in government, he has a knack for pursuing media coverage and is an active author. His swagger and contrarianism were displayed in the primary debates, where he routinely got into arguments with his fellow Republicans. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, was often involved in the exchanges.An exasperated Haley called him “scum” in the third debate, after he said her daughter had used TikTok, amid a discussion about banning the widely popular Chinese app. In the second debate, she told him: “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”