Vivek Ramaswamy Makes Key Promises About Presidency at FreedomFest

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition in Clive, Iowa, on April 22, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Republican primary run has been filled with promises, and often quite specific ones.

In the months since he threw his hat in the ring, the candidate has caught the ear of libertarians and conservatives by pledging to shut down the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Education, among other federal agencies.

He’s also vowed to release Jeffrey Epstein’s client list. In addition, Mr. Ramaswamy has said he will pardon Douglass Mackey, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, among others.

The young biotech entrepreneur’s goals for the White House are extremely ambitious—indeed, so much so that his critics have taken to characterizing him as a huckster who tells pro-Trump voters what they want to hear without really being able to deliver.

In his speech at FreedomFest on July 12, Mr. Ramaswamy told the liberty-loving crowd that he wanted to make well-grounded commitments.

“I don’t believe in false promises,” he said, stressing that many of his actions as president would be constrained by Congress’s level of support.

“There’s a few things that I can tell you that I know as president of the United States I'll be able to get done,” Mr. Ramaswamy continued.

Mr. Ramaswamy proceeded to outline what the American people could expect by January 2033–that is, after a second term in office, should he get the nod again in the 2028 election.

“We will once again in this country have three coequal branches of government, rather than an unconstitutional fourth branch of government,” he pledged, referring to the sprawling administrative state he has frequently castigated in his speeches.

“We will have reduced the federal employee headcount by over 75 percent so that once again, the people we elect to run the government will be the ones who actually run the government,” he continued, later mentioning his support for eight-year term limits for government bureaucrats.

He vowed that by the end of a hypothetical second Ramaswamy term, the United States would cease to be “dependent on communist China” for everyday consumer goods and “the way we actually live in this country.”

Mr. Ramaswamy also promised that the United States would have a more robust economy after eight years of his leadership.

More specifically, he promised to deliver “4 plus percent GDP [gross domestic product] growth again.”

“How do we get there? We drill, we frack, we burn coal, we embrace nuclear energy,” he continued.

Mr. Ramaswamy also said he'd spur growth by reforming, though not shutting down, the Federal Reserve, and by cutting regulations.

The exterior of the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building is seen in Washington, D.C., June 14, 2022. (Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)

The anti-ESG investor’s speech at FreedomFest comes after many weeks of intensive campaigning, particularly in the key early states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Mr. Ramaswamy has said that he will take the presidency if he claims the Granite State’s first-in-the-nation primary.

He’s also appeared across conservative, independent, and legacy media.

One early exchange in April saw him sparring with CNN anchor Don Lemon. The host criticized Mr. Ramaswamy for “sitting here, whatever ethnicity you are, explaining to me what it’s like to be black in America.”

Mr. Lemon was fired just days later.

In his remarks at FreedomFest, Mr. Ramaswamy hits notes that will be familiar to those who’ve been watching his campaign pick up steam.

Core American beliefs, he said, have been eroded, replaced by “wokism, gender ideology,” and a host of other value systems.

Millennials like him are “hungry for a cause.”

“We are hungry for purpose and meaning and identity,” he continued, arguing that the traditional ballasts of Americanism have been lost.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks to the press outside the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. United States Courthouse in Miami, Fla., on June 13, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

Speaking several weeks after the Supreme Court shot down affirmative action, Mr. Ramaswamy linked his opposition to all forms of affirmative action to a view of the United States as a propositional nation—that is, one defined entirely by the commitment to an abstract set of values rather than other facets of its heritage.

To be an American “means we believe in the ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago—ideals like meritocracy and the pursuit of excellence,” he said.

“If you’re like my parents, you do get to come to this country legally through the front door,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who is the son of Indian immigrants.

He told The Epoch Times in February that he favors a points-based system for immigration. Similar systems are in place elsewhere in the Anglophone world, including Canada.

“Your first act of entering this country cannot break the law, because that is what it means to be a nation founded on the rule of law,” he said at FreedomFest.

Migrants captured by U.S. Border Patrol agents go through a processing center near San Diego, Calif., on May 31, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Mr. Ramaswamy, who has become famous and, to some, notorious for his innovations as a campaigner, argued that Republicans have to become less reactive than they’ve been in the past.

The GOP, he said, has been “a movement that has been pretty good at pointing out the problem.”

“We’ve always been running from something. But I think that now is our moment to level up and to start running to something—to our vision of what it means to be an American today,” Mr. Ramaswamy continued.