SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Not long before a man with an AR-15 slung over his shoulder walked past City Hall, Vivek Ramaswamy did something that was, for him, shocking.
As a presidential candidate, the Ohio Republican never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like — from claiming the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an “inside job” to asserting the government lied to Americans about 9/11.
But speaking to reporters in front of Springfield, Ohio’s city hall, then later at both a town hall and in an interview with POLITICO, Ramaswamy repeatedly sidestepped questions about Donald Trump’s baseless claims that Haitian migrants were abducting and eating pets and wild animals here.
“I think the reality is, whether residents of this community are lying or not, that’s, I think, for other people to adjudicate,” he said as local authorities watched warily the man wielding the rifle and Ramaswamy’s team canceled plans to do a walking interview with a reporter to the town hall venue a few minutes away as a result. “But I do think that residents of this community have been raising their hand pleading for help and have not gotten attention at the federal level. And yet that’s sad, because this is an embodiment of, I think, failed federal policies.”
For Ramaswamy, it marked a departure from his fulsome embrace of outlandish conspiracies during his own 2024 presidential bid — while also serving as a case study in how Republicans are covering for Trump’s latest baseless claims about Springfield.
It isn’t Trump who’s lying, Ramaswamy suggested. If the claims are false — and officials here have said repeatedly that they are — that’s on the residents of this city.
It’s a delicate act for ambitious Republicans like Ramaswamy. The biotech entrepreneur has been floated as a potential contender for secretary of Homeland Security if Trump wins the presidential election, and he has a vested interest in currying favor with the former president. But as an Ohio politician who has suggested he might run for governor or senator, he also still needs to preserve some credibility in a state where even prominent Republicans have rebuked Trump for spreading false claims about migrants. If Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, win the election, Gov. Mike DeWine, who called the urban legends about Haitian migrants “garbage that was not true,” would pick Vance’s successor.
Ramaswamy, who spent much of his presidential campaign running into any news cycle that remotely validated his campaign’s anti-illegal immigration rhetoric, was something of a latecomer to the unfolding story in Springfield, where he spoke of growing up and playing tennis at nearby Wittenberg University and getting subs at Mike And Rosy’s Deli.
He also laid out a road map for Republicans who do not want to cross Trump — who has said he plans to visit the city in the coming days, against the wishes of Mayor Rob Rue — but want to stop talking about the former president’s claims about migrants eating pets.
It was not a novel strategy: He blamed the media. After meeting with city officials and members of the Haitian community, he spoke in front of a City Hall that had been shuttered by bomb threats just days ago with a group of local and national reporters, who asked him if he believed the claims about eating pets.
“I’m not here to talk about the issues that the media has really loved to obsess over — OK? — cats and dogs. We’re not talking about that time. We’re talking about human beings,” he said. Left unsaid, it was Trump and Vance who had stoked the issue and turned reporters’ attention to it.
In an interview with POLITICO, when asked why he refused to engage on the specific unfounded claims despite embracing others during his candidacy, he abruptly cut the interview short.
“I’ve propagated all kinds of conspiracy theories in the last several years, including the idea that Covid came from a lab in China, including that the Hunter Biden laptop story just might be real on the eve of the last election, including the fact that Joe Biden would not be the nominee,” he said. “I said that from the Republican debate stage and got criticized as a conspiracy theorist for it. So on multiple of those counts, you know, I guess, if that’s a label that describes me speaking things that ended up being true before others recognize them, I guess I’ll have to accept that.”
But why did he not repeat Trump and Vance’s claim?
“Well, what I have touched on — immigration, right?” he said.
Did he see his visit here as a kind of a political tryout for a Cabinet post?
“I’m not trying out for anything,” he responded.
At a sweaty town hall, where Ramaswamy said 2,000 people had RSVP’d but the venue could only fit a little more than 300, he did get a fawning question about his political future. When was he going to run for governor?
The audience roared.
“I’m a little more inclined than I was about 10 seconds ago,” he said.
The town hall itself — which featured a mostly white audience, not the Haitian community in question — centered on grievance, with one questioner complaining the Haitains drove “nicer cars than most of us.”
Ramaswamy told a story of offering a local nonprofit a six-figure donation but having it rejected, wondering if it was because of his political leanings.
But the more immediately pressing question of, as Ramaswamy called it, “cats and dogs,” was largely absent from the town hall.
Only near the beginning of the town hall did a man raise the issue of “motherless kittens in the alleyways.”
“Where’s the mothers?” the man asked. “OK, there’s the animal thing we can’t care for the least of these and get this, I don’t think it’s something Kamala should be laughing about.”
Ramaswamy didn’t agree or disagree with him. He thanked the man and asked his name. He asked the crowd to give him a round of applause.
Then he smiled and turned to the next questioner.
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