Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

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Recently announced presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy balked at the idea of a national divorce but told the audience at CPAC the nation needed a patriotic revival. 

“Do we want a national divorce? Or do we want a national revival? It’s not going to happen automatically, whatever it is — it is going to be what we choose it to be,” Ramaswamy said during his Friday speech. 

But the revival to which Ramaswamy referred was not the one Christians experience when God truly awakens His children. Rather, Ramaswamy called for America to become radically patriotic again. 

“We’re not gonna get national unity when somebody shows up with a proverbial bill, saying that ‘can’t we all hold hands … come along Kumbaya’ — that ship has sailed a long time ago,” Ramaswamy said. “You get national security in this country by embracing the extremism, the radicalism of the ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago.” 

Ramaswamy, who spoke on the same day and to the same audience as fellow candidate Nikki Haley, faced the same challenge that any Republican who declares will face – a decision about how to go about addressing the matter of former President Donald Trump. 

Where Haley avoided Trump, Ramaswamy tried to meet the challenge head-on. He spoke favorably of Trump and said he looked forward to a spirited race. 

“My good friend Donald Trump [is] a man who I took inspiration from to do what I’m doing now,” Ramaswamy said. “If he hadn’t done what he did in 2015 and 2016 as an outsider to come and shake up the system, I wouldn’t even have thought about doing what I’m doing today.”

Ramaswamy even found time for a joke at the former president’s expense when he referred to the possibility “that as this goes, we’ll get a little bit of name-calling” as little more than “locker room talk.” 

Like Haley, Ramaswamy received some heckling from the largely pro-Trump CPAC crowd, although Ramaswamy’s heckles happened during his speech whereas Haley’s occurred in the CPAC hallways. 

Still, Ramaswamy was generally well-received by the CPAC audience. His populist message – Ramaswamy described America as being locked in a struggle between the “managerial class and the everyday citizen” – drew generally positive responses from attendees. 

Similarly, Ramaswamy’s pledge to disband the FBI struck a positive chord.