Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Wednesday on CNN’s “NewsNight” that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) cleaned up “vermin” in San Francisco to roll out the red carpet for Xi Jinping.
Partial transcript as follows:
ABBY PHILLIP: That language, they live like vermin, do you believe that that is, as your Republican colleague Chris Christie has said, neo-Nazi rhetoric?
RAMASWAMY: This is a classic mainstream media move, pick some individual phrase of Donald Trump, focus on literally that word without actually interrogating the substance of what’s at issue.
PHILLIP: The word was chosen for a reason.
RAMASWAMY: We’re in a middle of a cultural war in this country. Well, you know what? It’s actually describing a series of behaviors. You have Antifa and other related groups that have been burning down cities for the last three years in this country.
PHILLIP: Would you describe them as vermin?
RAMASWAMY: While they’re violating the rule of law, we have an invasion on our southern border, we have millions of people crossing our southern border. Let’s talk about the substance of why we have to recognize we’re not in ordinary times. So, the vocabulary of the vermin or not is not what’s important.
PHILLIP: Would you use that language yourself?
RAMASWAMY: Well, I haven’t used that language.
PHILLIP: So, would you?
RAMASWAMY: If you look at the track record on my campaign trail, I talk about the issues, we all talk about them differently. But what I’m not going to do is play some game of focusing on some word that somebody else said without ignoring entirely the substance of what we’re actually talking about, a border crisis of historic proportion, economic stagnation we haven’t seen in 50 years, a national identity crisis, and loss of national pride in the next generation that’s potentially existential for this country.
Let’s talk about our dependence on China today. We’re actually talking about China’s Xi Jinping. Picking on Donald Trump’s word, vermin, to talk about that status quo. You know what’s vermin? What’s running around San Francisco on a given day before Gavin Newsom cleaned it up on a dime to roll up the red carpet for Xi Jinping. If he could do that for Xi Jinping, he could have done it on an ordinary day, and yet we’re here sitting and talking not about the substance of that but on one word Donald Trump said in some speech in Miami. This is what’s wrong with the mainstream media. Focus on the substance and let’s have an actual policy debate rather than talking to a presidential candidate instead of the policy substance of what’s actually going on in the country. Picking on some word that Donald Trump said on a certain day and asking me for a comment, give me a break.
PHILLIP: Look Mr. Ramaswamy, the former president saying that people on the left live like vermin in this country, that is a substantiated thing. The word choice was not accidental.
RAMASWAMY: Look at the way people live in San Francisco, normally.
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