The 2024 presidential primary field is filling up.
Entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy signaled to Fox News that he’s seriously considering entering the race and will give a final answer by the end of the month.
Ramaswamy told Fox News Digital in an interview that he’ll make his decision on whether to run for president before the end of February. The entrepreneur says his vision is about restoring the “national identity in America,” decrying the “vacuum” in younger generations who fill the void with “the poison of wokeism, and climatism, and transgenderism, and COVIDism for that matter.”
“Yes, I’ve accomplished things but so has everyone else who would be running in this race too. I think I am running on a vision that I believe I can articulate what it means to be an American in 2023,” Ramaswamy said.
The 37-year-old Ohio native warned the “real threat” to liberty in the year 2023 is the “merger of state power and corporate power” while knocking Republicans who “want to go back to 1980” and tout “Reaganite solutions.”
“The thing that distinguished Reagan is he did what he needed to do in his era. He stood up to the orthodoxies of his party and led a national revival at a time when America was in the middle of its last national identity crisis in the late 1970s. I think we’re in a late 1970s moment now,” Ramaswamy said. “I think 2024 could be a landslide election if we actually make it about those basic American ideals of merit, free speech, open debate.”
Ramaswamy is calling for a “total decoupling” from Communist China, who argued is “worse” of a threat to America today than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War since China makes the “shoes on our feet and the phones in our pockets.”
Throughout his sprawling interview with Fox News, the multi-millionaire investor also pointed to the concerning fentanyl epidemic coming from the southern border noting the “unholy alliance between China as the supplier and its distributors within the Mexican drug cartels.”
When asked if continuing to build the barrier started by the Trump administration would be enough to deter criminal activity Ramaswamy opted to take a harsher approach while admitting his tactic is not for the faint of heart.
“Go Mohammed Atta, bin Laden-style, Soleimani-style airstrikes, special forces, you name it. We’re taking them out,” Ramaswamy said. “I think it’s got to be a shock and awe strategy so that they don’t have a cycle of adaptation. Again, not something you’re supposed to say in polite company.”
If Ramaswamy enters the race he is likely poised to be one of the youngest and richest candidates in the contest. In 2016, Forbes reported his net worth was at a whopping $600 million. Forbes reported former President Trump has a net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2022.
In 2022, Ramaswamy founded the asset management firm Strive, which aims to be an alternative to what he calls the “woke” investment giant BlackRock, a major force in the ESG movement.
His entry would make him the first non-elected official and the second first-generation Indian American seeking the White House in the 2024 election cycle, the first being former ambassador to the U.N. and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who launched her candidacy last week.
He’s going no place fast.