It’s obvious who won the first Republican presidential debate—former President Donald J. Trump in a landslide.
As of 7 a.m. Washington time on Aug. 24, Tucker Carlson’s interview with President Trump on X, formerly known as Twitter, had received 154.7 million views. That’s roughly half of the country’s population and a good deal more than half of the voting-age population.
How many people watched the so-called undercard debate is, to my knowledge, unknown at this point, but it’s obvious that it’s a wildly lower number.
Still, who won that undercard?
Vivek Ramaswamy in a mini-landslide.
We see this in an ongoing poll posted on X by Real America’s Voice, with the current results of President Trump at 94 percent, Mr. Ramaswamy at 3.5 percent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 0.7 percent, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley at 0.4 percent, former Vice President Mike Pence at 0.2 percent, and others at 1.2 percent.
It has also been widely reported, and witnessed by the Star News Network’s Matt Kittle, who was in Milwaukee and with whom I was on a radio show this morning, that Mr. Ramaswamy was mobbed in the spin room by reporters who largely ignored the other candidates.
“One way to judge [who could unseat Trump] was to spend five minutes in the spin room with the press gaggle after the two-hour debate,” the Press’s Olivia Reingold wrote. “Former and current governors were ignored. A staffer for one of those campaigns tried to offer an interview to a CNN reporter, who politely declined: ‘Sorry, they really want Vivek.’”
Such is the ruthlessness of charisma. More to the point, Mr. Kittle also told us on the radio that he had interviewed Donald Trump Jr. outside the spin room. (The former president’s son wasn’t allowed in.) Don Jr., not surprisingly, asserted that his father had won the night, but when asked the winner of the undercard immediately said “Vivek.” (He had also, undoubtedly, heard Mr. Ramaswamy call his father the “best president of the 21st century.”)
These things aren’t said casually by the Trump family, which by now has plenty of political experience. The former president himself was evidently listening closely and, on Truth Social, gave Mr. Ramaswamy “a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH.”
This means two things. The internet and media in general are abuzz with talk of Mr. Ramaswamy for vice president (something in which he claims disinterest, but the country, not to mention his future, has a way of calling).
And, secondly, the aforementioned knives will be out for him as never before.
Mr. Ramaswamy is prepared for this; he told me as much some time ago. But my guess is that he‘ll get more than anyone could easily prepare for. He’ll have some things to explain from his entrepreneurial life, maybe some he didn’t know himself, and that’s the way of politics.
I’ve already seen him referred to as a Trojan horse and so forth. Nobody trusts anybody anymore—and with reason.
Whether the negatives will outweigh the several positives that won admiration from the debate crowd—Mr. Ramaswamy’s stand against the Ukraine war, his honesty about the dishonesty of climate change, his emphasis (like Larry Elder) on the importance of fathers in the home and the nuclear family in general, and his desire to cut what seems like at least half of our federal agencies—remains to be seen.
Of course, some of this groundswell will depend on the post-debate polls that will soon be appearing. People are expecting him to edge past Mr. DeSantis, but will that happen? If it doesn’t, the bloom may be off the proverbial rose, at least for now.
The governor may have done the entrepreneur a big favor, however, during one silent, but now often repeated interchange, via video clip, from the debate.
When the debaters were asked whether they would support President Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were to be convicted, Mr. Ramaswamy’s hand shot straight up. The others hesitated. Then, Mr. DeSantis glanced over at Mr. Ramaswamy, as if to see what he was doing, and raised his hand somewhat diffidently.
You don’t have to be an expert in body language to see what the optics of that were.
Finally, imagine this scenario that would seem at first glance outlandish but is increasingly likely. Suppose, for reasons good or ill (undoubtedly ill, but whatever), President Trump is incarcerated in the final months before the election in such a way that he can barely reach out to the public. (The Democrats were able to engineer this with the Jan. 6 people; why not with a former president?)
At that point, he would desperately need a running mate with the moxie, charisma, and media savvy to run around the country and espouse his cause—really, America’s cause.
Right now, Mr. Ramaswamy leads the pack.
