The Republican Ramaswami was the only one who refused to support the allocation of additional funds to Ukraine during the debate.
Photo: REUTERS
The first televised debate of the Republican Party’s US presidential candidates took place last night in US Wisconsin. They play an important role in choosing a single candidate for the upcoming elections.
Eight prominent primary contestants came to the city of Milwaukee. However, the leader of the electoral race, the former American head of state Donald Trump, refused to participate in the debate and spoke instead on the program of journalist Tucker Carlson, who, after his dismissal from Fox News, hosts on the platform. X (formerly Twitter).
Most of the participants in a kind of party congressional presidium are no strangers to this type of event: Nikki Haley was once the United States’ permanent representative to the UN, Mike Pence was vice president of the United States, Chris Christie was governor of New Jersey. But businessman Vivek Ramaswami is a newcomer to big politics. At the same time, in recent weeks he has been consistently on the list of leaders in public opinion polls and regularly tops another front-runner from the Republican camp: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Ramaswamy was the only one who during the debate refused to support the allocation of additional funds to Ukraine. “We are pushing Russia into the hands of China,” he explained his position, calling it insulting that some of his rivals were in kyiv to “make a pilgrimage to his potato.”
A different opinion was expressed by DeSantis, who did not directly reject assistance to kyiv, but offered to transfer it to the Europeans and the United States to protect their own borders.
Ramaswami tried to prod Pence, berating the 38-year-old competitor for his youth and lack of political experience. “We don’t need a newcomer,” he said, for which he was immediately criticized: he was reminded that under his rule the US debt increased by a fantastic $8 trillion.
Vivek Ramaswami now ranks second behind Trump and DeSantis. And with Trump’s campaign likely to be hampered by legal battles over multiple criminal charges against him, and DeSantis already struggling to raise donor funds to fund his campaign, the Indian-born businessman has become a Republican darling.
