How Trump is using one of his own GOP opponents in 2024 race: Conservative

Donald Trump's dominance over the GOP field is so strong that he has successfully created a subsidiary candidate, according to a conservative writer on Friday.

Rich Lowry of the National Review noted that "every vote" that entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy "gets is denied to some other non-Trump contender who might be a more serious threat to the former president." Trump reportedly uses that to his advantage.

"He’s so far ahead in the polls that he felt comfortable skipping the first GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, while on the actual debate stage, his epigone, Vivek Ramaswamy, soaked up an outsized portion of the attention," Lowry wrote Friday. "The 38-year-old billionaire biotech entrepreneur shows that the Trump brand is so strong that it can create successful subsidiaries, the Trump story line so compelling that subplots can be spun off into their own programs."

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Lowry described debate night as a “MAGA” tag team, "with Trump trying to detract from the debate from the outside and Ramaswamy shaking it up on the inside."

"When Trump declared a victor afterward, it was, unsurprisingly, Ramaswamy — for having the courage and perspicacity to declare Donald Trump the greatest president of the 21st century," the editor of National Review wrote in the piece. "If Ramaswamy minds these occasional condescending pats on the head, he hasn’t yet showed any sign of it. He is making history as the first presidential candidate to be in the tank for his leading opponent."

You can read it here.