Washington, Sep 1: Indian-American presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy hit out at his party rivals for attacking him after his impressive performance in the first Republican primary presidential debate last week, saying the knives are out because he is surging ahead in the race for the White House.
Ramaswamy’s appearance on the debate stage was a coup for his campaign, given that he had no prior experience as an elected official and had never before appeared at such an event.
After the debate performance, Ramaswamy’s adversaries like former vice president Mike Pence, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie have begun to direct some of their public and private attacks toward the 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur.
“We are continuing to surge in the race and that means the knives are continuing to come out, so we’re going to keep debunking the myths as they come up because I think it’s important to be transparent and address criticisms,” Ramaswamy said in a social media post on Thursday.
“That’s part of what it means. If you can’t handle the heat, you stay out of the kitchen. I’m running for president of the United States. So, we’re going to address any of these criticisms as they come out,” said the entrepreneur-turned-presidential aspirant.
“One is this funny, relatively old hack . that they’re pulling back out that I somehow made a lot of money off of some failed Alzheimer’s drug. Wrong! Actually, you know what is true is I did develop a drug for Alzheimer’s disease and like 99.7 per cent of drugs that have ever been tested for Alzheimer’s, thousands of other drugs, mine was one of the many that also didn’t work. That’s just a fact of life,” the presidential aspirant said. (AP)