'A horrible decision': Ramaswamy pounced on by ex-college classmate for 'culture' rant
Sports podcaster Pablo Torre pulled double-duty on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Friday morning first commenting on Netflix broadcasting NFL games on Christmas day and then being asked about a recent social media post made by Donald Trump advisor Vivek Ramaswamy which has caused a MAGA blow-up.
As "Morning Joe" co-host Johnathan Lemire pointed out, Torre and Ramaswamy were classmates at Harvard University where both graduated with honors and were members of Phi Beta Kappa.
Lemire pressed Torre to address Ramaswamy's X post where he asserted, among other things, "Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” and later added, "A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”
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According to Torre, Ramaswamy –– who will co-head Donald Trump's unfunded Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) –– likely infuriated the president-elect's "America First" base.
"It feels like, you know, a breakfast club speech written by a large language model and it is politically, I think, a horrible decision insofar as the coalition that he joined was mostly interested in him because of how he enabled their own grievances," Torre told the MSNBC host before joking, "And when I say 'they,' I mean the core of the MAGA base, which is 'America First' in a way that means White America First."
"So he's going to talk to that base, a nativist base, the same way that, I don't know, white people have been talking to Black people in America for a really long time –– I don't think they're going to like it," he continued.
"I believe that this is a remarkable fracturing ahead of [Trump's] Inauguration Day of a coalition that didn't make a lot of logical sense and you get to the idea this guy is talking about TV shows being the cause of this," he elaborated. "He's saying that America isn't sufficiently Urkel enough –– that's an argument he made. I'm, like, why is this guy trying to articulate a vision for America for anyone?"
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