He is considered the outsider in the crop of 2024 GOP presidential candidates, but ebullient businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has harbored a wish to be president ever since he was seven or eight.
Or so his mother said.
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“In the second grade, he wrote an essay that he wanted to be the president, but that, you know, we always laugh about because he was only [in] second grade,” said Geetha Ramaswamy.
“From very young he had good ambitions, he always talked along these lines, and it seemed like a dream,” she added.
In an interview on India’s Mirror Now, his mother and father came clean on their son’s aspirations which challenged some reporting that he got the idea of running for office after finishing undergraduate classes in 2007 and starting Yale Law School.
Time magazine wrote it this way:
“It was around this time that Ramaswamy says he may have first had fleeting thoughts about someday running for office. ‘I considered it briefly, the idea of possibly doing it at some point, when I was in law school,’ he says. Some in his circle insist he didn’t think much of electoral politics back then, but at least one person who knew him at that time tells me he mentioned plans to spend a decade building his business career before later becoming a candidate. The idea was to become so successful that he would be free to run on his true beliefs without bowing to the influence of the donor class.”
Ramaswamy even said on a podcast that he hadn’t thought about running until recently, telling Andy Frisella, “There were many years I didn’t vote in my 20s. Well, I wasn’t plotting to be president my whole life, turns out.”
But there were hints long before that.
His father, V.G. Ramaswamy, said in the interview, “For a long time we had a feeling that he will be heading in that direction because he had a lot of indications along the way during his growing up years.”
He expressed surprise at the timing, but Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld said it was clear to him that Ramaswamy planned the announcement to run after the publication of his book Woke, Inc.
He wrote for Fortune last month, “Two years ago, Ramaswamy, as a Harvard College and Yale Law School alumnus, desperately begged me through mutual friends to debate him on campus in a bid to promote his book attacking business ESG practices. Even then, he indicated a smoldering interest in running for president on the GOP ticket, according to emails I possess, by exploiting his anti-woke branding.”
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Of course he’s not the first candidate to dream for years of being president. Former Vice President Mike Pence once told me that he got the presidential bug as a kid and kept a memory box filled with stories about President John F. Kennedy.
His parents told Mirror Now that while he has not run and won before, their son provides fresh thinking from a successful leader. “We have started accepting when he goes for the moon, probably he will reach it,” said his mother.
