Heading into the first presidential debate of this Republican primary season, hosted by Fox News and streaming exclusively on the right-wing YouTube competitor Rumble, Fox is continuing to provide a friendly platform for biotech investor and gadfly presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Fox practically created Ramaswamy’s political campaign by giving him frequent TV appearances and, as a result, the country is now being exposed to more of Ramaswamy’s conspiracy theories and extremist policy ideas as he has risen in prominence. At the same time, Ramaswamy has used his newfound celebrity to consistently defend and advocate for disgraced former President Donald Trump, who announced Sunday that he’ll be skipping the debates.
Fox News host Sean Hannity previously commended Ramaswamy on May 1 for “going into enemy territory” via his mainstream media appearances, citing an April 19 appearance on CNN as a prime example. Such forays have continued, with Ramaswamy announcing in another CNN interview last week that he would allow Russia to keep Ukrainian territory it has seized since invading the country, and he would personally visit Moscow in an attempt to forge an alliance. And in a new profile piece in The Atlantic, Ramaswamy appeared to spread a variety of conspiracy theories about both 9/11 and January 6, which he then continued in a CNN interview Monday night, all of which amounts to an alarming display of paranoia for someone who is supposedly aspiring to the Oval Office.
Other right-wing media personalities have praised Ramaswamy, with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones calling him “Alex Jones 2.0.” Fox host Jesse Watters and Daily Wire host Michael Knowles have also endorsed Ramaswamy’s call to take the right to vote away from 18-to-24-year-olds, a proposal that would require repealing the 26th Amendment.
Indeed, the evidence now is that Ramaswamy is not even a threat to Trump — who continues to dominate in Republican primary polls, and who Ramaswamy does not really criticize — but instead to Trump’s closest (but still distant) serious rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The New York Times reported last week that a strategy memo by the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down recommended that DeSantis should “defend Trump” in the debate, and instead “take a sledgehammer” to Ramaswamy.
An analysis by Media Matters found that Ramaswamy has appeared on Fox News weekday programming at least 52 times since he declared his candidacy, which came on the February 21 edition of Fox’s since-canceled prime-time show Tucker Carlson Tonight. During his numerous Fox appearances over just the past week and a half, Ramaswamy has pushed a combination of conspiracy theories and continued adulation for Trump, along with promises to pardon not only the former president but some further number of January 6 defendants. The picture that emerges is not of a serious candidate running against Trump, but of yet another Trump ally making the case for his candidacy on Fox News.