Flip Flop: Vivek Ramaswamy Once Praised Mike Pence For His Actions on January 6, Now He Says He ‘Missed’ A ‘Historic Opportunity’
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy solemnly praised former Vice President Mike Pence for his actions on January 6 in a 2022 book, but now he says Pence missed a “historic opportunity” to bring about “national unity.”
In Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence, Ramaswamy tore into former President Donald Trump for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
According to the future candidate, Trump was guilty of selling a “tale of grievance” fueled by “a persecution complex.”
“Accepting the outcomes of elections and having a peaceful transition of power is part of what it means to be a constitutional republic,” he continued before noting, “Top election officials in virtually every state, regardless of party, said they’d found no evidence of any significant level of fraud.”
Thankfully, Ramaswamy argued, Pence stood in the breach.
“Mike Pence, a man I have great respect for, decided it was his constitutional duty to resist the president’s attempts to get him to unilaterally overturn the results of the election, even in the face of the January 6 Capitol riot,” he wrote. “Our institutions did hold.”
On Wednesday night, during and immediately following the Republican primary debate, however, Ramaswamy spun quite a different tale.
During a on stage discussion about the January 6 Capitol riot and whether Pence had done the right thing on that day, Ramaswamy repeatedly interrupted the other candidates to call for the abolishment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to urge Pence to pledge to “pardon Donald Trump” if he were elected president.
After the debate, National Review‘s John McCormack pressed Ramaswamy on his view of Pence’s decision.
First, Ramaswamy professed to have a “detailed answer” to the question and lamented that he had not been asked it. Then, after being given another opportunity to provide such an answer, he said this:
I think I would have done it very differently. I would have done very differently. So I think that there was a historic opportunity that was missed to settle a score in this country to say that we’re actually going to have a national compromise on this — single-day voting on Election Day as a federal holiday, which I think Congress should have acted in that window between November and January to say: paper ballots, government-issued ID. And if that’s the case, then we’re not going to complain about stolen elections. And if I were there, I would have declared on January 7th, saying now I’m going to win in a free and fair election. Unlike what we saw with Big Tech and others stealing the election last time around, fix the process. This time around, we get it right, and it was a missed opportunity to deliver national unity. That’s what I would have done, but that’s what I’m gonna be able to do as president is unite this country.
It’s unclear whether Ramaswamy was suggesting that he would have unilaterally declared a new election, or was saying he would have waited until 2024 to win a “free and fair election.”
It’s also unclear what new evidence has been presented to Ramaswamy since he wrote Nation of Victims to convince him that the 2020 election was neither free nor fair.
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