Ramaswamy Withdraws, Endorses Trump

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 16, 2024) — In the wake of the results of the 2024 Iowa Republican caucuses Monday evening, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy announced he would suspend his campaign and endorsed fellow candidate, former president and leading Republican primary contender Donald J. Trump.

Trump won the caucus vote by a “landslide” of more than 50% of votes cast, “delivering him the strongest win by a presidential candidate in the Republican caucuses’ 48-year history,” wrote the Des Moines Register at 4:00 a.m. Tuesday.

Ramaswamy, who had predicted “shock results” for his campaign coming out of the Iowa caucuses, garnered 7.7% support, according to NPR, with ABC News reporting his total at 8%.

Following the announcement of the results, Trump congratulated Ramaswamy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on a hard-fought primary race to that point.

DeSantis was declared to have finished in second place, though “distant,” with Haley approximately two points behind.

Leading up to the caucus votes, Ramaswamy touted his “deep understanding of the Constitution,” a claim he echoed on Fox News’s Ingraham Angle Monday night.

“I think that it is going to take somebody with fresh legs,” Ramaswamy told host Laura Ingraham in Des Moines. ”We’ve got over 390 events across the state…if you want somebody who’s actually going to shut down the Deep State…nobody’s gonna do that like me, ’cause it takes somebody who is a businessman…who also understands the laws and the Constitution of this country…”

He then promised, if elected, to eliminate “75%” of federal “bureaucrats.” ”Now’s a good time to do it, because there are more open jobs in the private sector right now than there are people looking for work, so we can stimulate the economy while we’re at it. And you know what? If you cut 75% of those bureaucrats, there go the regulations along with it as well. You know as well as I do that most of those regulations are unconstitutional, but we need a president who actually understands the Constitution.”

“So you think President Trump doesn’t understand the Constitution?” Ingraham interjected.

“I think my understanding of the Constitution is deeper than anybody else [sic] in this race, and I also think that I’m a businessman who comes from the outside,” he responded.

“Well, he’s a businessman,” Ingraham countered.

“But those things — you need both of them…” Ramaswamy replied.

In an interview with NBC News last fall, Ramaswamy revealed his parents, though present in the U.S. lawfully, were not naturalized at the time of his birth in Cincinnati, OH in 1985, an eligibility requirement some scholars believe the Framers of the Constitution imposed when they set forth in Article II, Section 1, clause 5 that “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

That interpretation of “natural born Citizen” has been supported by records found in the Congressional Globe and the 1874 case of Minor v. Happersett when the U.S. Supreme Court wrote:

The Constitution does not in words say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case, it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words “all children” are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as “all persons,” and if females are included in the last, they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact, the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.

On January 8, Trump reposted on TruthSocial a graphic from an article published by The Gateway Pundit summarizing the findings of law clerk, 2022 John Marshall Fellow, Trump-administration intern and commentator Paul Ingrassia stating unequivocally of Haley, whose birth circumstances mirror Ramaswamy’s, “The Constitution Absolutely Prohibits Nikki Haley From Being President Or Vice President.”

TGP‘s graphic contains the text:

In @NikkiHaley’s situation, reports indicate that her parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth in 1972. Based on the Constitution as interpreted by @PaulIngrassia, this disqualifies Haley from presidential or vice-presidential candidacy under the 12th Amendment.

“Nikki Haley’s flagrant defiance of the Constitution’s textual prerogative, if allowed to continue, will thrust all that remains of the Framers’ now-enervated handiwork into inexorably aimless waters,” Ingrassia wrote on New Year’s Day. ”…There is a reason the Founding Fathers attached the requirement of being a ‘natural born Citizen’ to the President (and with the passage of the Twelfth Amendment, the Vice President) only, and no other federal offices. The idea was to elevate the threshold for the highest elected political office of the land – notably, that language is absent in Article I, which stipulates that lawmakers running for the House or Senate need only be a ‘citizen’ to qualify. The early debates surrounding passage of the Constitution add support for the view that the Framers wanted to exclude ‘the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government,’ as John Jay wrote to George Washington in July of 1787.”

The mainstream media immediately excoriated Trump for revitalizing “birther” claims which he once focused on Barack Hussein Obama regarding his then-missing “birth certificate.”

On April 27, 2011, the Obama White House released what it said was Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate allegedly proving he was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.

Obama’s claimed father, a Kenyan national, reportedly never became a U.S. citizen, though is mother is said to have been anthropologist Stanley Ann Dunham, born in Kansas in 1942.

A pamphlet published in 1991 by Obama’s then-literary agent, Acton & Dystel, stated Obama “was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago.”

If accurate and proven, it would directly contradict Obama’s claimed stateside birth, which the media has cited as the linchpin of his eligibility.

In 2012, during Obama’s re-election campaign, Miriam Goderich, then of Acton & Dystel, claimed the statement of Obama’s birth in Kenya was a “fact checking error by me.”

Mike Zullo, a former detective who conducted a 5+-year investigation into the birth-certificate image and found it to be fraudulent, reported more than five years ago and again this month that it remains an “open secret” in Washington, DC that Obama “was not born in this country and that the birth certificate was manufactured.”

“I’ve heard that repeatedly from people of authority,” Zullo told us for our January 5 article.

As was the case during Obama’s first presidential campaign and now with Haley, the media conflated the term “citizen” with the Article II, Section 1, clause 5 term of “natural born Citizen.” ”Be smart,” Axios wrote on January 11, “Haley was born in the U.S., thus automatically making her a citizen.”

If re-elected, Trump has promised to do away with the practice of awarding “birthright citizenship” to any child born on U.S. soil, regardless of his parents’ citizenship or whether they were present in the country legally when the child was born.

As legal scholar Joseph DeMaio has referenced over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has not issued an opinion concerning the definition of ”natural born Citizen,” choosing rather to “evade” it after questions arose, beginning in 2007 and culminating in numerous legal challenges, as to Obama’s eligibility.