It’s the only way to truly prove your devotion
The National Review agrees with Coulter.
Some people have been skeptical about the presence of motivational speaker/venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race. My colleague Charlie Cooke cruelly accused him of “not really running for president.” An even less reputable writer irresponsibly declared that he had “voluntarily enserfed himself” to Donald Trump, which is the sort of tasteless language that I’m glad National Review no longer tolerates.
And with good reason, because Vivek Ramaswamy has proven himself worthy of his candidacy with a truly selfless act: He has called upon all of Donald Trump’s other opponents to sign a promise to pardon Trump of all his crimes regardless of guilt or innocence if they win office. Some opponents of the former president might have taken a combative position in regard to his indictment on 37 counts of stealing and withholding national secrets and more; others might sit on the fence. Yet here Ramaswamy is, with such surpassing grace and magnanimity, asking the entire field to sign his petition to give Trump a blank check. You just have to tip your cap to such a classy opponent.
But only so far. My primary criticism of Ramaswamy here is that he lacked the courage to go further. Committing to pardoning Trump before the facts have even been litigated is easy; anybody can do that. Heck, look at Gerald Ford: He not only pardoned Nixon, he went on to beat some forgotten loser in his primary afterwards. Aren’t you a bolder patriot than that hack RINO swamp creature Gerald Ford? The lack of commitment is alarming. Are you really on the team, Vivek? Then you have to prove yourself. Charlie Kirk made a far braver appeal to the persuasive power of self-immolatory protest when he demanded that all candidates other than Donald Trump simply suspend their campaigns in solidarity with him.
Neither choice goes remotely far enough. Ann Coulter was definitely onto something when she suggested that all Republicans commit suicide to signal their devotion to the cause (“otherwise, we don’t have a country, folks”), but that’s a waste of manpower — look, the national vote was bad enough for Republicans in 2020, we don’t have much of a margin for error here. Instead, we should only cull what’s necessary to prove our superior virtue: The other Republican candidates must agree to ritually off themselves.
It’s the only answer that makes any sense. There can be only one, after all. And there’s no reason to not be creative about it, either — sorry, Chris Christie, you bought the ticket, and now you’re gonna have to take the ride. My first thought was something along the lines of a Mesoamerican blood-sacrifice ritual to appease the angry Deep State Gods (imagine Apocalypto, but with Alex Bruesewitz holding Mike Pence’s still-twitching heart aloft in his hands to get Judge Cannon to dismiss the Trump indictment). But there are even more-fitting historical antecedents out there: Goujian (496–465 b.c.) of the Yue kingdom in China used to intimidate opposing armies by having his front-line soldiers spontaneously behead themselves before battle as a demonstration of fearlessness. Why not draft the rest of the Republican presidential field into making a similarly heroic gesture? At the very least, we may end up learning something about the kind of man Doug Burgum is (was).
Give due credit to Coulter for “knowing what time it is” and immediately recognizing people such as Kirk and Ramaswamy for being insufficiently devoted to the cause. It’s up to the rest of us to prove ourselves worthy of the Trump 2024 campaign, however, and now it’s our turn to push to make Vivek’s dream a reality.
Bring out the Kool-Aid. It’s the only way.