Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy had a contentious exchange with a CNN anchor attempting to grill him on former President Trump's "vermin" comments this week.
The legacy media has relentlessly attacked Trump for a term he used while hitting his political opponents at a campaign rally on Saturday, with several news organizations linking his rhetoric to infamous dictators like "Hitler" and "Mussolini."
"I pledge to you that we will root out the communist, Marxist, fascist, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," Trump told his supporters.
On Wednesday, CNN's Abby Phillip asked Ramaswamy whether he agreed with his GOP rival Chris Christie that Trump's "vermin" line was "neo-Nazi rhetoric."
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"This is a classic mainstream media move," Ramaswamy reacted, "Pick some individual phrase of Donald Trump, focus on literally that word without actually interrogating the substance of what's at issue-"
"The word was chosen for a reason," Phillip defended her question.
"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 wildly violating the rule of law," Ramaswamy said. "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 that we're not in ordinary times."
"Would you describe them as vermin?" Phillip interrupted as he was talking, later asking "Would you use that language yourself?"
"I haven't used that language," the biotech entrepreneur answered.
"Well, would you?" the CNN anchor pressed him.
"You can look at my track record on the campaign trail, I talk about the issues, we all talk about them differently. But what I'm not gonna 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 proportions, economic stagnation we haven't seen in 50 years, a national identity crisis and the loss of national pride in the next generation that's potentially existential for this country," the candidate responded.
"Let's talk about our dependence on China on a day we're actually talking about Xi Jinping- picking on Donald Trump's word ‘vermin’ to talk about that status quo, Ramaswamy said. "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 out 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 talking not about the substance of that but on one word that 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 comment on it? Give me a break," he added.
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The latest national Fox News poll released Wednesday showed Ramaswamy polling in fourth place at 7%, maintaining the same amount of support he had in October. Ahead of him are former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley at 11%, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 14% and Trump at a whopping 62%.
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