Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley floated Biden replacement theory

With the idea of Democrats replacing President Joe Biden as their nominee suddenly appearing plausible after his disastrous debate performance against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, many are suggesting they were there first.

Among them former Indian American presidential candidates, biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, first Indian American to serve in a presidential cabinet as US ambassador to UN under Trump.

“All people remember later is you said something crazy — without remembering what it was, when in fact the crazy thing that you said turned out to be true,” Ramaswamy was quoted as saying to Semafor, a political news website, in a phone interview.

“Many Republicans rejected this possibility last year when I spoke about it, let alone the Democrats in relegating this to fringe conspiracy talk,” added the politician who repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he’d be running against a Democrat other than Biden in November.

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Nikki Haley, the only Trump challenger to carry a state in the primary, frequently said Biden would be unable to finish his term, and that the next president would be female – either her or Vice President Kamala Harris.

“They are going to be smart about it,” Haley told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. “They’re going to bring somebody younger. They’re going to bring somebody vibrant. They’re going to bring somebody tested.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was also quick to suggest the Democrats “may sub him out for someone else,” and in part participated in a debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom on that premise, Semafor reported.

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“Now you have some of these media people saying that he should not run, and all this other stuff, when they knew this was how he was,” DeSantis told reporters at a press conference on Monday.

“They decided to paper that over, to try to get him across the finish line. Well, what happened on Thursday was that people saw with their own eyes, and so they’re not going to be able to gaslight that.”

“Biden may well stay in the race, but Thursday’s 90-minute debate turned an outlandish Republican theory into a mainstream Democratic opinion,” Semafor noted.