Opinion | Vivek Ramaswamy knows the trick to winning Republican votes

It’s fair to wonder because, eight years on, no one understands exactly what made Trump different from predecessors such as Herman Cain. I have a theory and so do you, but no one can say for sure. This fact is both a full employment plan for pundits and a lure for aspiring candidates who think they know the secret sauce and hope to copy it, only better.

But if such a plan can work, Ramaswamy is the candidate most likely to execute it successfully. Imagine a Trump Scale running from 1 to 100, where 100 is Trump and 1 is a soft-spoken social worker who has been happily married to the same man for 43 years. Ramaswamy is about a 63, by far the closest match in the current primary field. And the differences between him and Trump arguably make him more compelling.

Ramaswamy is, like Trump, a glib talker, a rich entrepreneur and a successful second-generation immigrant. Unlike Trump, he remains married to his first wife and has managed to amass his fortune, reportedly at least $600 million, without cheating his subcontractors or taking serial trips into bankruptcy. Yet like Trump, Ramaswamy’s fortune allows him to self-fund and puts him beyond economic sanction — and he has used that advantage to raise a giant middle finger to the liberal thinkers of the professional managerial class.

Ramaswamy’s core appeal is contained in the CNN interview last month in which hosts Poppy Harlow and Don Lemon gamely tried, but failed, to embarrass the candidate about a series of topics: Jan. 6, Fox News, his own recent speech at a National Rifle Association convention. Despite a serious fact deficit, Ramaswamy won every exchange by managing to change the subject to them: Why were they so obsessed with getting him to critique another network? Why were they so down on America?

At one point, a frustrated Lemon said, “When you are in Black skin and you live in this country, then you can disagree with me.” Ramaswamy fired back, “Don, I think we have to be able to talk about these issues regardless of the color of our skin.”

It couldn’t have gone better if Ramaswamy’s campaign had paid for it: Lemon sputtering, Ramaswamy cheerfully in command and, most important, a demonstration to Trumpian voters that Ramaswamy can’t be cowed by them, the upscale denizens of the professional managerial class who say you’re not even allowed to disagree with them. It only benefits Ramaswamy to have this conflict dramatized on live television.

Of course, selling a bunch of books and going viral on Twitter are a far cry from winning the presidency. To complete his quest, Ramaswamy will have to do more than tap into Trumpian resentment, or even win a minor skirmish with Don Lemon. He must also defeat the master from whom he learned these tricks.

If he has a shot, it will be because he hits many of the same notes while remaining a little more upbeat, a lot more in command of policy details, and even, occasionally, something of an old fashioned market conservative. In “Woke, Inc.,” the book that launched him onto the conservative scene, Ramaswamy calls capitalism and democracy “the mother and father of America.” He suggests we might curb the excesses of woke capital with an even stricter version of shareholder capitalism that forces companies to focus on profit — a solution a lot of CEOs might also prefer.

This is the kind of story a libertarian columnist might be tempted to find compelling, if it weren’t accompanied by a lot of MAGA pandering, and pitted with gaping holes: Ramaswamy couldn’t, as president, fire 50 percent of federal employees, if only because too many of them do stuff that Republican primary voters want done, like patrolling the borders or mailing checks to red-state retirees. Nor could he resolve conflicts over social issues by directing corporations to focus on profit rather than politics. If LGBTQ+ creatives quit Disney over its storylines, that is an issue of profitability.

Then again, stories don’t have to be plausible to be politically compelling. And while no one might know his secret, Trump did teach the world two things: long shots sometimes come in, and you don’t have to win over the media gatekeepers to win a lot of votes.