“We’re not up against a candidate. We’re up against a machine,”: Vivek Ramaswamy

Washington: Republican leader Vivek Ramaswamy, who had predicted President Joe Biden would not be the Democratic presidential nominee for the November election, has said the country is not running against a candidate but an unelected managerial class machine.

The Indian-American businessman-turned-politician said on Monday that the speed at which the ruling Democratic Party moved to replace incumbent President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as a possible candidate for the November 5 polls raises lots of questions.

“We're not actually running against a candidate here. We're running against a machine. That's a deep understanding of what's going on that requires rejecting some of the things you might otherwise think,” Ramaswamy said in a 15-minute long video posted on various social media platforms.

We’re not up against a candidate. We’re up against a managerial machine. pic.twitter.com/0pmr5O8p78

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 22, 2024

During the Republican presidential debate last November, Ramaswamy, 38, had predicted that Biden would not be the Democratic presidential nominee, a claim dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory’ by much of the mainstream media at that time.

On Sunday, Biden shocked the nation by announcing that he is backing out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who, as of now, is the only Democratic Party leader in the race.

“It's not Biden that we were up against at all. His cognitive deficits, and I would argue Kamala Harris's cognitive deficits, they're not a bug to the people who control them. Those cognitive deficits are a feature. It is a wheel of the managerial class crushing the will of everyday citizens, not just in the Republican Party, but even in the Democratic Party,” he said.

He said that the Democrats may not agree with everything that Donald Trump or the Republican Party says today, and that's fine. No two Americans agree on 100 per cent of policies. That's a rarity, Ramaswamy, who in January suspended his Republican presidential campaign and endorsed former president Donald Trump, said.

But you do deserve a president and a party that at least tells you the truth, not just when it's easy, but when it's hard and when it's uncomfortable, he said.

“Beyond just this individual game, whether it's Joe or whether it's Kamala, we got to realise the thing that we're actually solving for is defeating that machine, the rise of that managerial class, bigger than any other individual, it embodies the philosophy of what the modern left is really about,” he said in the video that went viral on social media.

“It's not about individual agency. It's that collective will. That's what this machine really is about.... That's really what we're running against. That's what we're running to defeat. That's the system we're running to break. That's what the deep state is really about,” Ramaswamy said.

“This is about the unelected managerial, you could call them elites, you could call them bureaucrats, you could call them monarchs, who have no accountability to the people, but whose decisions are actually most impactful on how citizens live their lives,” he said and urged the Democrats to put their best possible nominee for the elections.

Ramaswamy alleged that this is a party and a movement on the Democrat side that has made it its core reason for existence to keep former president Trump out of office. “They've tried every way to stop him within the legal system and extra-legally as well.” But all their efforts to keep him from the ballot have not just failed but backfired making Trump and the Republican Party more popular, he added.