Vivek Ramaswamy suspends presidential campaign

CNN —

Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy ended his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination Monday night after a disappointing finish in the Iowa caucuses.

“I will stick to the truth tonight. The first hard truth and this was hard for me, I gotta admit this, but we’ve looked at it every which way. And I think it is true that we did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight,” he said at his campaign’s watch party in Des Moines, Iowa.

Ramaswamy then formally endorsed former President Donald Trump, the projected victor of the Iowa caucuses.

“Earlier tonight, I called Donald Trump to tell him that I congratulate him on his victory. And now going forward, he will have my full endorsement for the presidency,” he said.

He said he plans to travel to New Hampshire to campaign for Trump on Tuesday ahead of the state’s primary next week.

“Tomorrow we’re likely – I’m going to appear with Donald Trump at a rally in New Hampshire to lay out what I see and what we see for the future of the country,” he said.

At 38, Ramaswamy was the youngest candidate in the field, and he touted his youth and relative political inexperience as part of a broader appeal for a new generation of leadership, often drawing contrasts with older, more establishment-aligned Republicans.

“America is in the midst of a national identity crisis. We hunger for purpose at a moment when faith, patriotism and hard work are on the decline,” Ramaswamy wrote in The Wall Street Journal announcing his campaign. “The Republican Party’s top priority should be to fill this void with an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance. Instead, many top Republicans recite slogans they memorized in 1980 or