Vivek Ramaswamy: Kamala Harris backs ‘wrong policies while actually believing nothing at all’

CHICAGO — On the fourth and final morning of the Democratic National Convention , former President Donald Trump 's campaign sent out his ex-primary opponent and current surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy swinging. The billionaire biotech entrepreneur closed out a week of counterprogramming from the Republican ex-president, with Ramaswamy excoriating Kamala Harris over the vice president's record on everything from the 10 million illegal immigrants who entered the country since President Joe Biden appointed her the border czar to her new economic proposals.

"That's alarming that several hundreds of thousands of kids have gone completely unaccounted for and are now vulnerable to be sold into the equivalent of slavery in the United States of America," Ramaswamy said, referring to the new Department of Homeland Security inspector general report that indicated an additional 320,000 minor migrants have gone missing under Harris's term. "So I think this form of child slavery, when you use a word like child slavery, you think about something happening halfway around the world, in another hemisphere, another century. It's actually alive and well right here in the United States of America, and yet, the very people who were responsible for it are the ones who preach compassion. That's not compassion. That's cruelty."

Ramaswamy also noted that in the DNC's host city of Chicago, taxpayers are forced to spend some $7,000 per migrant per month on social services.

"It was interesting to come back to Chicago in the middle of this convention, and I'm glad, actually, I'm grateful, that Democrats appear to now agree with Donald Trump's policy of building a wall. If only they cared as much about keeping illegals out of our country as they do keeping their own left-wing protesters out of their own convention, our border crisis would actually be behind them," Ramaswamy said. Chicago police arrested more than a dozen anti-Israel protesters on Monday and another 72 the day after, and there was a final night of agitators who demonstrated directly in front of the United Center as Harris accepted her party's presidential nomination.

Ramaswamy, himself a veteran of finance and the private sector, also used his extended critique of Harris's shocking proposal to tax unrealized capital gains to offer a packed room of journalists a crash course in economics.

"Does the government accept shares in that business?" Ramaswamy said of the hypothetical. "No, they don't. They only accept cash. So here's what that means. It will trigger a cycle of what the business world and the capital markets would call forced selling. Forced selling means you don't want to sell, but you're forced to sell because you have to pay the tax out of pocket. But it turns out you won't be the only person required to do that. Somebody else will be required to do that too, but they'll have to do it at a lower price because you already sold, and your sale drove down the price of the asset. And then when the next person does it, that triggers down the price of the asset further. But the guy sitting next to him has to sell that asset to pay his taxes. That is how you trigger what you call a downward spiral in asset prices. It's the best formula for triggering a second Great Depression, if we ever had one."

Ramaswamy closed with a withering assessment of Harris's ideological flexibility relative to the tried-and-true progressives in the Senate, such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

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"I disagree with them on their policies, but the reason I respect the likes of Bernie Sanders more is at least he's actually willing to still stand behind his own policy proposals," Ramaswamy said of Warren and Sanders. "And the only thing worse than somebody who believes the wrong thing is somebody who advances the wrong policies while actually believing nothing at all."

Should Trump win and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) vacate his seat in the Senate, Ramaswamy is widely considered to be a competitive contender to replace Vance or run for governor after Mike DeWine (R-OH), who is term-limited, departs in 2027.