DID VIVEK RAMASWAMY JUST END HIS POLITICAL CAREER?

What the hell is Vivek Ramaswamy thinking?

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Tuesday plans to call on the GOP to embrace a less overtly belligerent and oppositional posture, Axios has learned.

...Ramaswamy will be the featured speaker at a Montana State University event being held by Turning Point USA, the organization [Charlie] Kirk co-founded.

According to his prepared remarks, Ramaswamy will say the conservative moment is at a "fork in the road" and urge them to abandon its fixation on "owning the libs" in favor of a less overtly confrontational posture.

"We can still stand for truth, while viewing those who believe in falsehoods not as our enemies who must be vanquished, but instead as our fellow citizens who have lost their way and must be shown the light," Ramaswamy will say.

"Not to berate them, embarrass them, and banish them -- but to pray for them, to talk to them, and to persuade them," he will add.

In Ramaswamy's view, conservatives have a monopoly on truth and the rest of us "have lost their way and must be shown the light." Gosh, thanks, Vivek. I really feel seen and respected.

But sure, it would be good if the right abandoned its total war on Democrats, liberalism, and progressivism. It would be good if Republicans concluded that they need to coexist with the rest of us with and accept that we'll wield political power sometimes.

But they won't. As A.R. Moxon recently wrote, quoting Ezra Klein, "'we are going to have to live here with each other' is the exact premise that Republicans do not agree with any of us about." From Co-President Russell Vought on down, they want to purge all liberal and progressive influence from every institution in American life. They want their authority to supersede that of Democrats in cities and states that are currently blue. (As I've told you a few times, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, wants Republican governors to "de-charter" Democratic-run cities and take them over, a plan that President Trump seems to be instituting at a national level.)

And, of course, rank-and-file right-wingers simply despise us. They hate everything about us. Their main form of entertainment is watching Fox News, which portrays us as dangerous freaks on a 24/7 basis.

I think I know why Ramaswamy is doing this. He's running for governor next year and he's certain to win the Republican nomination because he has Donald Trump's endorsement -- but he knows that Democrats sometimes overperform in midterms when there's a Republican president. A fairly popuar Democrat, Sherrod Brown, is likely to be on the ballot as the party's Senate candidate, and at least one poll has shown him trailing, but within the margin of error. Ramaswamy might believe that he'll need a few swing voters to win the gubernatorial election.

Ramaswamy might also believe that Trumpism will be unpopular even in his red state by next year, or that "MAGA" will fade if the president really is in poor health and dies in the next year or so. (I believe that "MAGA" is just a subset of the longstanding hate-Democrats cult and will easily survive Trump's demise. And even if Trump becomes increasingly unpopular, the right-wing noise machine will simply create new Two Minutes' Hates that don't rely on Trump. Recall that the right's jihads against Critical Race Theory, DEI, and trans people largely began just after the 2020 election, when many people thought Trump was a spent force and the GOP appeared to need a rebranding.)

It's conceivable that Ramaswamy merely wants us to think he's taking the high road, while he has no intention of distancing himself from the GOP's war on Democrats and liberals. He'll seem like a high-minded post-Trump conservative, and he'll be the subject of glowing feature stories in The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic without ever challenging his party's nasty messaging.

Or he'll drop this peacemaker act when he realizes no one in his party wants it. (He'll need to if he wants to win a Republican presidential primary in 2028 or beyond.)

But if Ramaswamy is sincere about this, he's cooked. Recently, when I did that podcast with DougJ, he reminded me of a post I wrote in 2011 in which I wrote about Jon Huntsman, who was looking to challenge Barack Obama in 2012, as a politcal version of M.C. Hammer trying to hold on to his audience at a time when his family-friendly rap style was rapidly losing market share to gangsta rap. In the post, I quoted a New York Times story in which Huntsman was interviewed by Matt Bai:

Didn't he at some point have to get in tune with the emotions of his party's electorate? "I had one person who came up to me at an event in Florida," he replied, "and said, 'If you get into this, are you going to take it to the president, take him down and all this, eviscerate him?' And I said, 'Ma'am, you’ve just described a losing strategy for the next Republican.' You're either able to take a message to the heart and soul of the American people that they can connect with, or you're done.

"I think what's going to drive this election, really, are two things -- authenticity and the economy," Huntsman told me. "I think people have become so disillusioned by the professional nature of politics -- the organizations around politicians, the way that politicians approach problem-solving, the way in which they go about their daily business. There has been very little in the way of authenticity in politics in recent years."

Huntsman ran in 2012 and withdrew after getting less than one percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses and losing the New Hampshire primary by more than 20 points.

The fever hadn't broken then. It won't break any time soon.