UPPER ARLINGTON, Ohio — A disembodied voice filters through the hallway of a $2 million estate in a leafy suburban neighborhood outside Columbus, as the early morning light floods an entryway near a winding staircase. At its base sits an empty chair surrounded by five audio-visual staffers.
“Guys, you can’t see my feet, right?” says the voice.
A second later, Vivek Ramaswamy materializes, barefoot, in a black suit with parts of his white dress shirt shooting out from beneath his suit vents. He got home at 11 p.m. the night before from Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where his private campaign plane’s cabin had de-pressurized and he missed an event. But by 9 a.m. he was already geared up for a day of back-to-back media appearances. He takes a seat in front of a camera. Nearby, Ramaswamy’s personal security guard scans an iPad featuring 16 different views of his home, which, Ramaswamy told me, he purchased with cash in 2021.
It’s a Tuesday in early August, and the insurgent, mercurial millennial Republican presidential candidate and former biotech entrepreneur is briefly off the trail and back home readying to go on camera. First up is a two-hour podcast interview with Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist. Ramaswamy takes a seat and slides in a pair of AirPods.
He starts talking and he doesn’t stop. He once did some 30 interviews in one day alone, and has appeared on more than 150 podcasts since launching his campaign in February. For a while, the only outlet he couldn’t get on seemed to be MSNBC, which had not booked him for an interview until recently, something that had clearly gnawed at him before. (A few days after I sent an email asking an MSNBC spokesperson about their rationale for excluding him, Ramaswamy finally scored an appearance on the network; MSNBC didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Today is a “light day” he and his team tell me. He would end up sitting for roughly five hours of interviews. He is only scheduled for: two podcasts; a sit down with ABC; a conversation with a radio station out of Myrtle Beach, S.C.; an interview with Axios’ local Columbus website; an evening standup with NewsNation; and appearances on Fox News and CNN. That’s not to mention the two interviews he granted me while we drove around his hometown in his black Cadillac Escalade and a third interview in his backyard that evening as his youngest son Arjun played underfoot.
This is what it takes to go from zero percent in the GOP primary polls in February to 7 percent today. That puts him — at 38, the youngest presidential candidate in the field — solidly in third place. He’ll be at center stage at Wednesday’s first GOP debate, and if memos on Ron DeSantis’ strategy and pre-debate attacks from Mike Pence and Nikki Haley are any indication, all knives will be out for the political newcomer.