Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Sunday that if he wins the 2024 election, he would ask former President Donald Trump to serve as his adviser and mentor.
“I want to build on the foundation that Trump laid,” the former biotech entrepreneur told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “I don’t want to learn the same lessons again. I want to pick up where he left off taking over the administrative state.”
Ramaswamy, who drew most of the attacks from his rivals in last week’s first Republican primary debate in the absence of lead candidate Trump, said Trump has been “duped” by his own White House advisers, who have warned that a whole host of fire federal employees.
“Read the law,” he urged Todd. “It turns out that these protections in the public sector only apply to individual layoffs, not to collective layoffs. Mass layoffs are absolutely what I will be bringing to the DC bureaucracy.”
Elsewhere in her interview, Todd discussed with Ramaswamy his conflicting comments on former Vice President Mike Pence’s confirmation of the 2020 election.
Last week, Ramaswamy was criticized for comparing MP Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) to one of the “modern day great wizards of the modern KKK.”
Watch the interview here: