Opinion | Get Ready for the Vivek Ramaswamy Moment

If the 2024 Republican contest ended today, the big winners would be Donald Trump — the presumptive nominee — and Vivek Ramaswamy.

The entrepreneur has raised his national profile with an energetic, media-focused guerrilla campaign, and he probably has a moment ahead of him in the GOP race.

He has popped to third place in some national polls (although always in single digits), generated a favorable reaction at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa moderated by Tucker Carlson and has a good chance of excelling in the first Republican debate next month.

Ramaswamy, who has no political experience and no chance of winning the nomination, rightfully has no business running for president, which should be about more than gaining notoriety in order to enhance other career opportunities, whether in media, politics or something else.

That said, there’s no doubt that he’s good at what he does.

After Donald Trump, he might be the best communicator in the race — certainly no one else in the rest of the field is clearly better than he is.

He tends to make favorable impressions wherever he goes. He’s personable and warm backstage, knows how to give a speech and read a room, and makes Republican audiences believe that he really gets it.

He compares himself to the Trump of 2016 as the outsider candidate, although he doesn’t have anything like the star power of Trump, who dominated the media and brought what turned out to be a powerful new combination of issues and attitudes to the table.

The better comparison is to Mayor Pete, who also had no business running for president in 2020 and didn’t let it stop him.

Buttigieg bootstrapped himself from being the relatively undistinguished mayor of a college town into a Cabinet post and perhaps another presidential run at some point, or failing that, a Harvard fellowship or the like.

As a young, hyperarticulate, openly gay technocrat who occasionally read Norwegian novels, Buttigieg appealed to a certain segment of progressives who found in him confirmation that they are supposedly more intelligent, tolerant and sophisticated than their countrymen.

As a young, hyperarticulate Indian American businessman committed to fighting “woke” corporations, Ramaswamy appeals to conservatives who are frequently drawn to non-white champions and are now focused on how the private sector represents a threat to their values. (Herman Cain and Ben Carson both briefly caught the imagination of Republican voters when they ran.)

The danger of being an underprepared candidate in the Buttigieg- or Ramaswamy-mold is getting cornered on something and exposed as unserious. But smarts and verbal agility minimize this risk. Fortune favors the glib.

Buttigieg hardly had a bad answer in any of the Democratic debates. We’ll see how Ramaswamy fares on the debate stage — he should fear Chris Christie in particular, who’s going to be loaded for bear — but he’s been able to handle pretty much anything thrown his way so far in press interviews.

Part of Ramaswamy’s appeal to Republican voters has been taking every interview and giving as good as he gets, demonstrating self-confidence and media skills. Sharp exchanges with Don Lemon on CNN and Chuck Todd on Meet the Press in particular spread widely and generated free-media attention.

Ramaswamy’s approach has contrasted with that of Ron DeSantis, who, prior to his current re-set, had stayed firmly within the conservative media cocoon and forgone the opportunity for generating interest by jousting with challenging interviewers.

Ramaswamy is, to put it mildly, also going with the grain of the current Trump-dominated Republican Party.

The 2024 race represents an ongoing field test of whether the best way to run against Trump is to make a very careful case against him based on electability and effectiveness (DeSantis); to blast away (Christie); or not really to run against him at all (Ramaswamy).

That doesn’t mean that Ramaswamy won’t occasionally swipe at Trump — for instance, on the possibility that the former president will skip the first debate — but he’s about as interested in picking fights with him as a gazelle is in tangling with a lion on the Serengeti.

Because Ramaswamy’s political message was basically created in a lab in the post-Trump context, he’s unburdened by ancestral Republican positions that might hold back, say, a Tim Scott or Nikki Haley.

His positions on Ukraine (cut a deal with Vladimir Putin), the FBI (replace it) and Jan. 6 (caused by censorship), just happen to be perfectly aligned with the fashionable populist tendency within the GOP.

In certain respects, he’s more pro-Trump than Trump. The former president maintains his innocence in the classified documents case, but Ramaswamy traveled to Miami the day Trump was arraigned to demand that the other Republican candidates join him and commit to pardoning Trump.

Ramaswamy is nothing if not audacious. He talks about how he’ll run against President Joe Biden in the general or negotiate with President Xi Jinping of China as if he’s the runaway frontrunner and without betraying the slightest awareness that these things aren’t going to happen.

Nonetheless, Republicans like him, he’s having fun on the trail — always an infectious quality — and his coverage in the conservative press has been overwhelmingly positive. He has more upside in the race.

It’s the nature of his candidacy that he doesn’t need to win to come out a winner.