| “He is certainly a contender,” says Vinjamuri. “I mean, right now, nobody’s a serious contender because Trump is sailing so far ahead. But any number of things could happen to Trump, and if one of those things happens, then Vivek Ramaswamy is the person who has captured front and centre of the GOP debates. He was the one everyone on stage wanted to put down. And that usually happens when somebody looks like a real threat.” Will Trump ultimately secure the Republican nomination? “There’s nothing self evident that would rule him out,” she says. There are not many eligibility requirements for US presidents and a criminal record doesn’t disqualify someone from the race, so in theory, yes. But it’d be pretty difficult to campaign from prison. If Trump is stopped it will not be “because someone says it’s illegal for him to stand, but because somebody makes the calculation that the public opinion is moving against him – too many indictments, trials, all these legal proceedings – and he is becoming less interesting and somebody else is taking the stage.” Could Ramaswamy be that somebody? He is currently third in the polls, with Trump flying higher than ever on 49.2%. Meanwhile, Trump’s onetime nearest rival – Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who was polling 40% in January – loses support almost every time he opens his mouth. He is now down to 14.19%, with Ramaswamy next on 10.1%. “A lot of it is going to come down to: where do people put their money?” says Vinjamuri. Ramaswamy has high-profile support from rightwing billionaires including PayPal founder Peter Thiel, as my colleague Martin Pengelly has reported. Vinjamuri is not convinced that Ramaswamy, as the “dark-skinned son of an immigrant”, will be able to appeal to Trump’s base. “They’ll like his anti-climate, anti-woke rhetoric,” she says. “But are they really going to grab on to someone who doesn’t looks like them? The Republican party has been so dominated by a man who has peddled white nationalism, who has been racist in his rhetoric.” Can he beat Biden? “General elections are won in the swing states,” says Vinjamuri. “And the Democrats are not gonna swing to Ramaswamy because on every issue he is just so far away from them.” Joe Biden has declared his candidacy, despite more than three-quarters of respondents in a new US poll saying he would be too old to be effective if re-elected president next year, when he will be 81. “The view in the Democratic camp is that if it’s going to be Trump, it needs to be Biden. But if it’s Ramaswamy, what about Pete Buttigieg?” she says, referring to Biden’s 41-year-old secretary of state for transport, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020. “If Trump exits the scene, everything becomes an open question.” | 