Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy ended his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination Monday night after a disappointing finish in the Iowa caucuses.
“I will stick to the truth tonight. The first hard truth and this was hard for me, I gotta admit this, but we’ve looked at it every which way. And I think it is true that we did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight,” he said at his campaign’s watch party in Des Moines, Iowa.
Ramaswamy then formally endorsed former President Donald Trump, the projected winner of the Iowa caucuses.
“Earlier tonight, I called Donald Trump to tell him that I congratulate him on his victory. And now going forward, he will have my full endorsement for the presidency,” he said.
He said he plans to travel to New Hampshire to campaign for Trump on Tuesday ahead of the state’s primary next week.
“Tomorrow we’re likely – I’m going to appear with Donald Trump at a rally in New Hampshire to lay out what I see and what we see for the future of the country,” he said.
At 38, Ramaswamy was the youngest candidate in the field, and he touted his youth and relative political inexperience as part of a broader appeal for a new generation of leadership.
“America is in the midst of a national identity crisis. We hunger for purpose at a moment when faith, patriotism and hard work are on the decline,” Ramaswamy wrote in The Wall Street Journal announcing his campaign. “The Republican Party’s top priority should be to fill this void with an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance. Instead, many top Republicans recite slogans they memorized in 1980 or criticize left-wing culture without offering an alternative.”
Ramaswamy stood out from the rest of the Republican field for his embrace of Trump even as other rivals sought to weaken the primary front-runner.
He aligned himself closely with Trump’s policy vision, self-identified as a part of the “America First movement” and called Trump “the greatest president of the 21st century.” And he forcefully defended the former president after each of his indictments, pledging to pardon Trump of federal charges if he were elected to the White House and calling on other candidates to make the same commitment.
