There are a lot of people who won’t be elected president next year. Vivek Ramaswamy is one of those people. That doesn’t mean, however, that we won’t be forced to listen to him for the next few months. With Trump recently becoming a mugshawty and facing a hilariously long list of indictments, everyone in the media has to pretend that there’s someone else ready and willing to take his mantle in the event that prosecutors have the cajones to actually lock him up.
Most of these people are politicians you’ve never heard of, while others are names you’ve heard wholly too much. Take, for example, Chris Christie, who’s taking another crack at this whole president thing after getting just 10 percent of the vote in 2016, or Ron DeSantis, the literal pudding-faced cretin who can’t go a few sentences without letting out one of the most terrifying fake laughs imaginable.
Finally, enter Ramaswamy, a dude who made his money by creating a biotech company, buying and hyping up an Alzheimer’s drug that turned out to be a dud, then slowly cashing out until he became very nearly a billionaire. Now, he’s got a new money-making innovation, and it looks like it comes in a shape that Egypt fans will love.
@themaxburns Vivek Ramaswamy's pyramid scheme style fundraising plan is nuts #politics #news #2024 ♬ original sound - Max Burns
According to Politico, the campaign, entitled “Vivek Kitchen Cabinet,” goes a little something like this: Eligible participants will undergo a background check. If they’re approved, they’re given an affiliate link through which their friends and family can donate. For every one of those donations, the Kitchen Cabinet member will receive 10 percent.
Sounds good? Sure. Who doesn’t love free money? But the campaign hasn’t seemed to answer the question of what happens when one of these Kitchen Cabinet members signs up another Kitchen Cabinet member — do they get a portion of their earnings as well? Are we doing campaign Amway over here?
In defense of this move, Ramaswamy has said that there’s plenty of other trickery that goes into campaign fundraising, and that he’s just a player on the field of this very messed-up game. It’s a fair enough defense. After all, other candidates have also employed strange maneuvers to try to grab the attention of potential voters. Earlier this year, Perry Johnson launched a store in which all items could be purchased for just $1 — an attempt to push him past the 40,000 donor requirement for joining the Republican debates.
As you may have noticed, Johnson was not featured in the debates in the end; he has since claimed that the Republican National Committee and Fox News engaged in a “collusive effort to cherry-pick” candidates that prevented him from taking the stage. A sore loser if you ask me, but a few more $1 T-shirts may be able to convince me otherwise.
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