Inside the bitter 'animosity' between GOP presidential hopefuls Vivek Ramaswamy and Mike Pence

With Donald Trump remaining the frontrunner in the 2020 GOP presidential primary, his rivals are trying to stand out in a variety of ways.

Vivek Ramaswamy has praised Trump's presidency while arguing that he is best equipped to take the MAGA agenda to the next level. Former Vice President Mike Pence, meanwhile, is saying the GOP needs to move on from Trump, but he has been mild in his criticism and avoided the type of scathing attacks coming from former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas).

Pence and Ramaswamy, however, have been attacking one another vehemently, underscoring the tensions between the GOP establishment and hyper-MAGA Republicans. The "animosity" between those two candidates, Politico reporters Lisa Kashinsky and Adam Wren stress in an article published on September 5, has been "impossible to miss."

"For nearly a month," Kashinsky and Wren observe, "Pence has laid into Ramaswamy on everything from his views on tax policy and 9/11 to Russia's war on Ukraine. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, suggested Pence blew a 'historic opportunity' to usher in voting reform on January 6, saying he would have 'done it very differently.' Pence said Ramaswamy's proposal was 'incoherent and unconstitutional.'"

When Pence and Ramaswamy attack one another, the Politico reporters add, one is witnessing two very different visions for the Republican Party.

"It's an ideological and generational conflict between the 64-year-old Pence, who boasts more than three decades in the conservative movement, and the 38-year-old Ramaswamy, who identified as a libertarian before transitioning to a MAGA brand of Republicanism," according to Kashinsky and Wren. "It personifies a broader dispute over the direction of the party…. The feud between Pence and Ramaswamy captures a distinct dynamic of the 2024 primary, in which candidates fearful of offending Trump's base trade fire with one another rather than assail the frontrunner."