Excellent Read: “vivek Ramaswamy Is Going After The Abusive Parent Vote”

Huge co-sign from Trump on Ramaswamy's shockingly vile ad just now. It has to feel amazing, if you're running as an abusive predator, to get this kind of endorsement from the number one abusive predator in the game.

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— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) October 22, 2026 at 3:23 PM

National treasure Dave Roth, at Defector [gift link]:

This is not to discredit the existence of some underlying tactical or strategic calculations, and it is absolutely not extending credit to the shockingly vile creatures doing it, but when you see a reactionary candidate being disgusting, it is safe to assume that they are doing it because they really believe in it. The decade and change in which Donald Trump has been the main character in American public life has been a notably bad one for metaphor and subtext, among other things, but it has been a notably revealing one where some fundamental national political impulses are concerned. Trump himself is too dim and too brazen for that game’s familiar euphemisms, and his inability or unwillingness to promise to deliver harm in the usual coded language was central to his political appeal. It was also novel enough to convince some people that he was interested in doing something other than inflicting that pain.

This was true for partisans who thrilled at hearing him make explicit the implicit conservative value of hurting the most vulnerable people, and also to a significant faction of people without any other real values who mistook the brutal liberties that Trump has always taken for himself for ones that they would be able to enjoy themselves by supporting him. There is no other way to say it: Donald Trump inspired these people. He inspired them to be their worst and smallest and cruelest selves, but inspiration is a value-neutral thing. This is to say that he inspired those people to be more like him, and to live as he lives—in the indulgent certainty that even their puniest comfort or fleeting amusement or flash of childish anger was more important than anything or anyone else in the world, and then to behave accordingly. Many of these people surely had suspected as much already and moved through the world as if it were true; the carnage and stupid suffering that all that heedless, headlong motion produces is everywhere you look. Some of these people, inevitably, were going to run for political office.

People like that will always be a danger to everyone around them, but it’s at this point that they truly become everyone’s problem. There is a world in which Vivek Ramaswamy is just one of the many millions of Americans—please do not think about how many there are, how many you have met and will someday meet—who just are like this, and move through their days with what even a layperson could diagnose as “walking malignant narcissism.” But that alternate-universe Ramaswamy would be contained within some grim gated community and grim gated personal and business relationships; his capacity to do the damage such a person would invariably do would be limited to those unfortunate enough to wind up in his path. That Ramaswamy would also be an extremely odious man, a curdled being driven entirely by resentment and appetite. But very few people would ever know his name. That’s the best-case scenario.

The Vivek Ramaswamy that we got instead is a failed presidential candidate and flailing Republican gubernatorial candidate in Ohio. Our Ramaswamy is connected enough and slick enough and rich enough to have won the GOP nomination for this office, even at a moment when his party is more gleefully hostile to anyone of his background—Ramaswamy is Indian-American and Hindu—than at any other moment in my lifetime. That crude bigotry is central to conservative politics in a way that is not new, but is newly overt, and Ramaswamy himself has faced a great deal of it. It is a testament to his deep dedication to the movement’s vile anti-principles and his own singular unpleasantness that this does not really make him any more sympathetic.

Like many other candidates otherwise without any ideas about using the office they seek to address any of the many grinding horrors of American life, Ramaswamy got as far as he has by making a scaled-down version of Trump’s promises in similarly shameless and dishonest ways. That is, by pledging that he would be exactly as cruel as all those newly liberated little Trumps to all the same people and in all the same ways that those little Trumps would, and also that he would obey Trump’s own whims with appropriately lavish servility. None of that would make anyone’s life better—it would, due to some crucial things absent in Ramaswamy’s being, probably not even make his own life much more fulfilled—but it was the most he could offer, and the most that his similarly benighted public would ever ask. It is enough that they know the right people’s lives will be made worse.

That gambit is not going well. Ramaswamy may yet defeat his Democratic opponent, former Ohio Department of Health director Dr. Amy Acton; the state favors Republicans very strongly now, and also this is just an extremely lousy and evil moment, which makes it tough to count out lousy and evil candidates. But this moment is also bad enough in specific ways—essential stuff is expensive and getting more so, for reasons that that are obviously attributable to the president and his party; a free market in the last thrashing stages of syphilitic decline seems dead set on closing hospitals and opening data centers, which the president and his party are fine with—that Ramaswamy and other candidates who tied themselves to Trump are suffering badly from that association…

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