DURHAM, New Hampshire — Former President Donald Trump’s rally speech on Saturday was filled with doom and gloom, along with some final jabs at his opponents—except for one.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old biopharmaceutical entrepreneur and the most loathed nemesis among the rest of the field, earned a special carveout reserved for few others.
“We like Ramaswamy,” Trump said after whacking his rivals Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, along with the usual hits on President Joe Biden. “You know why? Because he likes Trump.”
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Ramaswamy is the Trump campaign’s approved spoiler candidate, as The Daily Beast reported in August. Despite fizzling after an initial polling bump around the first debate in August, Ramaswamy has yet to resort to attacking Trump. Instead, he’s been something akin to a surrogate on the debate stage, recently telling his fellow candidates they were “licking Donald Trump’s boots” before criticizing him.
The only other figures who got a positive mention from Trump were other world dictators.
He called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn a “highly respected” leader.
He praised China’s Xi Jinping for the way he “controls 1.4 billion people rather ruthlessly.”
Trump also saved a compliment for one of his dearest pals, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, whom he said agrees with his assessment that President Biden is “weak,” and how the North Korean heir “doesn’t like incompetent people.”
The former president mostly stuck to his greatest hits at the rally, held at the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore Center arena. He did, however, brag about coming up with some new material on the spot.
“We’re calling it The New Green Scam,” Trump said in one of his biggest applause lines of the night, a riff on The Green New Deal.
“I came up with that on the spot,” Trump said as the crowd roared, predicting a margin of victory in the upcoming Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary by at least 50 to 70 percentage points.
Still, Trump had a slight caveat to his praise for Ramaswamy, one he did not reserve for any of the aforementioned dictators.
“This is probably a personality defect,” Trump said at one point, referring to his soft spot for Ramaswamy, “but I tend to like people who like me.”
