'God resides in each of us': 4 highlights from Vivek Ramaswamy's Iowa town hall

3. Ramaswamy: Vote for me ‘if you want to save Trump and save this country’

Another audience member brought up the indictments against Trump and the efforts to remove him from the ballot, asking, “How do I vote for Vivek Ramaswamy without sending the message that I am OK with what they are doing to Donald Trump?”

“If you want to save Trump and save this country, a vote for me is actually the way to go,” he replied. Ramaswamy added, “What they’re doing to Donald Trump is wrong. I have stood up against it in every step of this process.” 

“At this point, it is my firm conviction that this system, which has ratcheted up the threat level one-by-one to eliminating Donald Trump from the ballot, will stop at nothing … to keep this man away from the White House,” he stated. “I think the best way to literally save Trump is to at least have arguably somebody the system might actually ... prefer less than Donald Trump for what I’m bringing to Washington, D.C., and I think that’s also what this country requires.”

While Ramaswamy outlined the actions he has taken in defense of Trump throughout the Republican primary process and offered praise to the former president, Ramaswamy said, “I think they duped him at many steps.” He cited the insistence to Trump that he could not fire civil service bureaucrats as an example of him getting “duped.”

“Our America First agenda does not belong to Donald Trump just as it doesn’t belong to me or anybody else up here. It belongs to you, to us, to we the people of this country, and we owe it to this country to make sure that movement does not end with Donald Trump.” 

“I believe we’re being led into a trap right now and it pains me to watch it,” he warned, suggesting that “the system” was working to ensure that the America First movement ends with the defeat of Trump in the 2024 presidential election. 

Acknowledging the “emotional component” to voters’ ongoing support for Trump as he pointed to his heart, Ramaswamy declared, “I actually think we need to vote with our brains.” He surmised that “there’s times when you vote with your heart and there’s times when you vote with your brain.”