A political novice and one of the world’s wealthiest millennials, Vivek Ramaswamy has waged a whirlwind presidential campaign mirroring his meteoric rise as a biotech entrepreneur. On everything from deporting people born in the United States to ending aid to Israel and Ukraine, he consistently displays the bravado of a populist, self-declared outsider.

“I stand on the side of revolution,” he declares. “That’s what I’m going to lead in a way that no establishment politician can.”

In business and politics, though, Ramaswamy has run into skeptics and sometimes hard facts that threatened to derail his ambitions. In the 2024 campaign, the Israel-Hamas war has refocused the Republican primary on foreign policy and exposed just how much Ramaswamy’s self-declared revolutionary approach puts him at odds with the party’s most powerful figures and many of its voters.