Vivek Ramaswamy may have best summed up the inaugural 2024 Republican debate on Monday night with this distinctly grim assessment during an exchange with former Vice President Mike Pence.
"It's not morning in America, we live in a dark moment," Ramaswamy observed as Pence futilely defended good governance to an audience of Republican nihilists.
A dark moment indeed.
When Fox News moderators asked the eight Republican candidates on stage whether they would support Donald Trump if he were convicted, most of them anxiously eyed their opponents before sheepishly raising their hands.
Watch this profile in courage as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Pence followed the lead of Ramaswamy.
Here's the wide angle:
Ultimately, six of eight Republican candidates said they would support a man in 2024 who could be convicted of trying to defraud American voters four years earlier. Only former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson declined.
It was a relative moment of unity on stage that, like several other key moments, revealed the default position of Republicans as practically disqualifying among a group of dial-in independents tracked by the progressive polling consortium Navigator Research.
When it came to the key issues on which the general election will likely be fought—Trump's alleged crimes, fitness for office, and abortion—the Republican crowd's reaction was almost always polar opposite of the dial-in independents.
For instance, when Christie looked directly into the cameras and said of Trump, "Someone has got to stop normalizing this conduct," the crowd began booing just as reactions from independents started trending up.
"Whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong," Christie continued, "the conduct is beneath the office of president of the United States."
By the time Christie finished, he had cleared 90% among independent women and 80% among independents overall.
The same was true of former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson's assertion that Trump is "morally disqualified" from running for president due to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Watch the independent lines rise during Hutchinson's explanation right as audience boos begin drowning him out.
The other side of the coin was Ramaswamy absolutely plummeting with independents as he declared Trump "the best president of the 21st century." The crowd went wild.
Republicans also tanked with independents, women especially, as they talked about abortion bans and their "pro-life" values.
"The dials are absolutely destroying Pence when talking about abortion," tweeted Bryan Bennett, Navigator's senior director of polling. "Independent women dip below 30. This is one of the most consistently unpopular answers of the night."
One area of comity: Ramaswamy did momentarily succeed in uniting Navigator's independents and audience members against him when he called climate change a "hoax."
Outside of the MAGA bubble, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had a good night: She was strong, forceful, and persisted in telling the audience truths they didn't want to hear.
"We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America," Haley said at one point.
On foreign policy, she took on Ramaswamy for siding with Russia over Ukraine, saying, "You have no foreign policy experience and it shows."
Haley needed to reassure high-dollar Republican donors they should keep funding her candidacy, and she likely succeeded.
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pounded one more nail into the coffin of his ailing campaign. He sounded like a canned politician awkwardly delivering memorized lines the entire night.
DeSantis actually glitched just before delivering his closing statement.
But inside the MAGA bubble, Ramaswamy—who MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid dubbed "your annoying college roommate"—likely slayed.
CNN asked a focus group of more than a dozen Iowa Republicans who won the debate, and only three candidates garnered votes: two for DeSantis, four for Haley, and seven for Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy played the Trump wannabe the entire night. His vision for the Republican Party was Trump's vision, he was an expert bloviator with zero experience, and he shamelessly stole from his political predecessors.
During his introduction to the audience, Ramaswamy joked that everybody was wondering, "Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name?" Sound familiar? It's a Barack Obama classic from the 2004 Democratic convention speech that launched him into the political stratosphere.
Even Ramaswamy's dark moment was cribbed from Trump's 2017 “American carnage” inauguration speech.
In short, Ramaswamy is a phony, a bamboozler, just like Trump. And out of eight candidates on stage, he's the guy who appears to have won over MAGA Republicans.
In other words, they chose Trump even though Trump wasn't there. That’s downright ominous.
