Ramaswamy drops out — and what’s next for Haley, DeSantis after Iowa

Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out of the 2024 Republican presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump Monday night, moments after the former president delivered a victory speech following his emphatic first-place finish in the Iowa caucus.

“We did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight,” Ramaswamy, 38, told supporters in Des Moines. “There’s no path for me to be the next president, absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country.”

“And I think that I am very worried for our country. I think we are skating on thin ice as a nation,” he added.

“This has to be an America First candidate in that White House. As I’ve said since the beginning there are two America First candidates,” Ramaswamy said before revealing he had called Trump to “congratulate him on his victory.”

“And so I’m going to ask you to follow me taking our America First movement to the next level,” he told the crowd.

Trump, 77, was projected to win the race by the Associated Press just 30 minutes after caucusgoers entered locations to cast their ballots for the 2024 GOP presidential nominee. The ex-president was followed by DeSantis, 45, in a distant second and Haley, 51, in third place.

“The people of Iowa sent a clear message tonight: Donald Trump will be the next Republican nominee for President. It’s now time to make him the next President of the United States,” Make America Great Again Inc. spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said in a statement.

“Joe Biden’s team just announced a massive war chest. Every dollar spent by President Trump’s primary losers is a dollar that could be fighting Joe Biden. Once the DC RINOs are finished crying in their cocktails over tonight’s results, it’s time for Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy to face reality and stop wasting time and resources.”

But apart from Ramaswamy, no other candidates were planning to drop out as of early Tuesday, hoping that polling in other primary states or at least one of Trump’s criminal indictments could complicate his path to the Republican presidential nomination.

The candidates will vie in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina in the coming weeks before heading to Michigan, Missouri and North Dakota in late February and early March.

DeSantis reassured his supporters in West Des Moines that he was “in it for the long haul” — despite having largely ignored campaign events in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire.

The Florida governor was scheduled to appear Tuesday morning in South Carolina, where he will try to overhaul both Haley and Trump and achieve an unlikely victory.

Haley has outperformed DeSantis among Granite State voters and has even come within single digits of the 45th president in some polls.

She is expected to pick up even more voters with the departure of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie from the race last week and is looking for a surprise victory over the former president in New Hampshire.

“I don’t play for second,” the former South Carolina governor has often responded when asked whether she would make a bid for Trump’s vice presidential pick.

Ramaswamy had expressed no desire to suspend his campaign before his announcement, saying in recent social media posts that the Iowa contest was “RIGGED” and that Haley’s surge in recent months was orchestrated by “puppet masters.”

Trump himself upped his attacks against Ramaswamy in the final days before the caucus, dismissing the 38-year-old candidate for having “PLAYED IT TOO ‘CUTE’” with his campaign in the early days of the Republican primary.

Trump is still facing two federal cases for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and allegedly retain national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

He also was charged in Manhattan for allegedly committing business fraud by concealing “hush money” payments to two women before the 2016 election and again for trying to reverse the 2020 election in Georgia.

The former president has also been kicked off the primary ballots in Colorado and Maine, with the US Supreme Court due to hear an appeal of the Centennial State decision Feb. 8.

Ramaswamy said the indictments and efforts to remove Trump from the ballot were an attempt by the “system” to elevate Haley and narrow the campaign to a “2-horse race.”

“I respect the hell out of Trump. He’s the best President of the 21st century. I’ve defended him at every step against the unjust persecutions,” he posted Saturday on X.

“But OPEN YOUR EYES to the hard TRUTH: this system will stop at nothing to keep this man away from the White House. Just because it’s wrong doesn’t mean it won’t happen & we owe it to our nation to take America-First forward.”

By Super Tuesday, the GOP nominating contest’s medley of primary elections on March 5, the eventual party candidate will have likely emerged — around the same time that Trump is scheduled to appear for his first federal trial.