Tag: Vivek Ramaswamy

Steve Hilton For Governor of California: With Trump, state competition is the key to Making America Great Again

It’s not just Vivek Ramaswamy, or Byron Donalds who are Trump endorsed candidates running for governor of their respective states in 2026, but I learned at Vivek’s West Chester event from Vivek himself that the Fox News personality Steve Hilton was also planning to run for governor of California once Gavin Newsom terms out after this current term.  Steve Hilton is best known for his show, The Next Generation, which he had on the 9 PM time slot on Sunday nights and was popular; it ran from 2017 to 2023.  But I hadn’t heard what Steve was doing since then, other than showing up here and there as a guest on various shows.  He’s a very positive person and is part of the next generation of political commentators that I have been talking about lately, and that is certainly the case here.  Once Vivek arrived at CTL Aerospace to speak about his announcement to run for governor, I learned that Steve Hilton was flying out from California to speak for two minutes to give Vivek Ramaswamy a warm announcement.   I realized that a very positive pattern was emerging, leading straight out of the Trump White House.  Trump was building a brand in politics that would carry others to succeed him, and once he put his name on that person, the Trump machine would get behind that person and take them to victory.  Steve Hilton has become good friends with Vivek Ramaswamy, and now that Vivek has put his hat in the ring, Steve told us all at that West Chester event that he was planning to do the same in California, which provoked a long conversation with me backstage after he concluded his speech for Vivek. 

If you haven’t noticed Fox News lately, even they can’t ignore the world trend that eluded them for the previous decade as they wanted to turn more to the center and not be known as a right-winged network once Roger Ailes died.  The Rupert Murdoch kids are not conservative at all, and the wives of the boys wanted to take the station toward New York high society politics rather than conservative populism that was put forth by personalities like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Tucker Carlson, and it hurt them.  Then, their position against President Trump was outrageously radicalized.  Again, when discussing left/right politics, the “left” represents Karl Marx’s ideas.  The “right” represents capitalism.  So, being called one or the other is a more profound indication on the political scale of right and wrong, and Fox News was trying to move to the “left” while Roger Ailes had built the network toward the right.  It was not something Rupert Murdoch was politically inclined to, but it was popular, so he went with it as long as the channel made money.  But the kids don’t care so much about making money; they were more concerned with social status, so they made a bad business decision, parted ways with top talent at Fox News, and drove a wedge with Trump himself that they thought they could survive.  They falsely believed that they were the news, not that they reflected their audience, a common mistake everyone is learning from now that Trump is back in the White House.  Woke is out, and common sense is back in.  Even in NFL football, my favorite team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have reinstated their old coach, Jon Gruden, back into their Ring of Honor.  They took him down after a fake scandal was invented to drive him out of football over leaked emails Gruden had written.  The whole premise was that Gruden could be kicked out of the NFL just for thinking and saying something, and that trend has gone the other way, leaving the Buccaneers under this Trump administration to get with the program and to reinstate Gruden to their Ring of Honor. 

That’s kind of what has happened with Fox News, many of the people who were frequently on Fox News are now in Trump’s cabinet and are doing very well, and it has been good for Fox as a business and they are having to make decisions to step away from their commitment to left winged politics.  The Trump family was pushed away from the network before the election, but now they can’t get enough of Trump, leaving Lara Trump to have her own show on the weekends like Steve Hilton did.  So Steve, always an upbeat personality, talked to me about all this as Vivek was speaking in West Chester, and we talked about this trend, the kind of people Trump was building to extend his government beyond the reach of any critics and to destroy conventional politics on its face.  And specifically with California, everyone thought that Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be a good Republican governor, but he turned out to be a RINO loser who could never stand up to the unions and ended up disgraced.  And at that point, California turned radical left and is currently miserable.  A prime time for someone like Steve Hilton to run and win the state and bring the fifth largest economy in the world back to sensibility.  Trump had a plan to make America Great Again, and that started by decentralizing the presidency and moving things back to the states where his hand-picked people would be running those states two years into this current administration, and through state competition, Trump was going to change the political landscape forever.

Remember when NBC tried to replace Trump on The Apprentice with Schwarzenegger because they thought the whole success of that show was a tough guy telling people they were fired?  Well, Schwarzenegger bombed, just as he did as governor because he was an actor, not a leader.  Trump is a battle-hardened leader who learned how to be successful in show business.  And these picks for governor positions are similar; they were privately successful but have learned to master the media to convey authentic leadership.  And Steve Hilton could do what Schwarzenegger or Gavin Newsom could never do in California.  Those personalities knew how to manipulate an audience behind the camera but were paralyzed regarding real-world activities.  And Democrats don’t have any other personality that can step forward and explain the massive failures that the people of California have suffered under Gavin Newsom.  So, another endorsement of Steve Hilton by Trump could easily carry him into a win there, too.  The world is changing for the better, and as I told Steve, you can see a pattern emerging that he is undoubtedly a part of.  And he would be great in California.  Like Vivek Ramaswamy, Steve Hilton is an excellent public speaker who can convey a message.  But more than that, he understands how to identify problems, which he always did on his Fox show.  And like many of the successful personalities on Fox, they need a chance to show their stuff on a political stage.  So, California won’t be left behind in all the fun regarding governor races in 2026.  I think it’s excellent, and the radical political left of Karl Marx won’t have a way to deal with it.  Trump endorsements are a new brand in politics that Democrats have no plan for, especially in states they have ruined, like California.  Once he announces, Steve Hilton is poised to win there in a big way. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Trump Endorses Vivek Ramaswamy: Dumb things Dave Yost and Amy Acton said

Again, I don’t want to see Dave Yost embarrass himself because I like the guy, the current Attorney General of Ohio.  But one of his biggest problems that was obvious to me when I went to his governor run announcement event was that he’s out of step with a skipping record, just a little too late on everything and slightly off-kilter with the flow of reality.  Under normal conditions, he might be able to run for governor and win, especially against the person the Democrats are going to put up, Amy Acton.  But these aren’t regular times.  I’m supporting Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of Ohio, and the GOP should get behind him and make it happen.  Vivek is going to be governor no matter what any opposition tries to do to prevent it.  On the same day that Vivek announced he was running from West Chester, Ohio, President Trump came out immediately and endorsed Vivek to settle the issue and let all the other GOP contenders know where the President’s heart was on the matter.  And the person who wins in Ohio, no matter how good Vivek Ramaswamy is, will be the person President Trump picks.  The Trump endorsement is crucial because voters will rally to whoever that is. And for the Governor race of Ohio in 2026, it is Vivek Ramaswamy.  And to make sure nobody gets any funny ideas, Vivek Ramaswamy will be all over the media and state in an overwhelming fashion to make sure that he gets a chance to meet everyone he could possibly meet along the way.  He has been doing media on television almost every day since his announcement, which shows that he will work hard to win people’s votes.  Vivek will not take anything for granted, and he will win the election and be Ohio’s next governor. 

Vivek/Lang has a nice ring to it, I think

But upon hearing that Vivek was running, Dave Yost said some foolish things that won’t help him and actually make that skipping record syndrome much worse, and I have to warn him that if he wants a political future, he needs to not say such dumb things.  Among these was his attack on Vivek and trying to paint him as someone who starts a lot of projects but never finishes them, such as dropping out of the Presidential race, dropping out of D.O.G.E. with Elon Musk, and moving his company STRIVE to Texas because Ohio costs too much to do business in.  Yost is trying to portray Ramaswamy as a quitter.  But instead, Yost showed himself grotesquely out of touch as he didn’t get the GOP memo.  I learned about Vivek Ramaswamy’s running for governor with an early morning phone call two weeks before Christmas of 2024.  Something of a deal was made, and Trump wanted Vivek Ramaswamy to be Ohio’s governor because the goal was for the Trump economy to turn a Rust Belt state into one of the world’s tech leaders.  It’s the home state of J.D. Vance, who many in the MAGA movement would like to see carry the torch of the next four years of Trump.  Vivek is the right guy to bring all those elements together in Ohio.  Yost pointed out that Vivek dropped out of the presidential race after a fourth-place showing in Iowa, as if that said everything.  But the reality was that Vivek, while running for President, never went after Trump but was loyal the entire time.  So, Vivek wasn’t an either-or candidate but was a continuation of the MAGA movement, and if that were the criterion, people would have rather had Trump finish what was started during the first term.  Vivek instead ran on a MAGA platform to build on the issue rather than try to corrode it away with debate.

Most people who are affiliated with the GOP know about this Trump arrangement.  I asked my sources if I could talk about it, and they said I could, so it wasn’t super secret.  Mike DeWine, Ohio’s current governor, was then called to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump.  He and Jon Husted did this, and the deal was made.  DeWine would appoint Husted to the vacant senate seat left behind by Vance so that he wouldn’t be destroyed by Vivek becoming governor because Husted wanted to run too.  Trump is the party’s leader and will likely remain that way for the rest of his life.  He is the one who won that right, and people need to follow that vision.  Vivek Ramaswamy also had to do that to run for governor of a state when he wanted to be president.  That’s how you build successful teams, and all these guys played their part in creating a bigger vision of what the MAGA movement would be like after Trump was no longer in the White House.  But to make the most of it while he was there.  Time is short, opportunities are limited, and Dave Yost, to be wise, should hitch his wagon to one of these Trump strategies and not stick himself on the outside looking in.  Because once the window closes, it will close forever.  The Ohio GOP doesn’t need a media-driven mess for the upcoming primary.  It requires a unified party with the hands of Trump on it, and Dave Yost needs to find a place in it, not out of it, for his own good.  That’s the only warning shot I’ll give. If he didn’t know that Vivek was running, then that’s even worse because everyone else did, and it only shows how out of step he is, made even worse by every day that he does not get behind Vivek Ramaswamy. 

Then there is the Democrat Amy Acton and her dumb comments about Vivek as if she knows how to run against him.  I’ll make a prediction: She is going to be crushed by the debate skills of Vivek Ramaswamy.  Acton is the former Health Director of the State of Ohio appointed by DeWine, which caused all kinds of problems with COVID-19.  Amy Acton shut down Ohio as one of the leaders of all states to be the first to lockdown, which was standard of all the Democrat led states.  Only Ohio was supposed to be a red state.  DeWine allowed himself to be suckered by the stringy hair hippie style of Yellow Springs politics that Amy Acton represents, and it won’t go well for her.  I’m looking forward to it because Vivek can tell a story about her that has not been told yet.  She would have been wise to stay under a rock for what she did to Ohio during COVID-19, but she’s the best Democrats have, which says a lot about them.  She is running, but I don’t think the Democrats have any idea of what kind of buzz saw they are going to run into with this one.  Trump has his ideas about it because Ohio did lockdown during his last year in office, making it much harder for him to keep the nation together during that crisis.  So he will support Vivek vivaciously; let me just put it nicely.  Once everyone is done with Amy Acton, there won’t be a rock in the world to hide under, and she will not be able to hide her shame for the rest of her life, which she deserves.  And that’s just how it’s all going to go down.  So plan accordingly. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Story of the Card: When people do good things for all the right reasons

Interestingly, just a few weeks after Vivek Ramaswamy announced he was running for Governor of Ohio at CTL Aerospace in West Chester, we both found ourselves at the Library of Congress, for different reasons, on the same day.  Vivek is all in and doing media interviews every day on the prime-time Fox News shows and other places, and he was at the Library of Congress to celebrate Ohio’s birthday for statehood, which is a pretty interesting story.  And that, too, is interesting: since President Trump has returned to the White House, where he was rightfully supposed to be, many of my close friends have suddenly had a lot of business in Washington, D.C.  But one of the aspects of all this that I get asked about the most is that when Vivek came to West Chester to make his big announcement, people wondered why Vivek and I seemed to know each other and what was it with that card I showed him when he arrived.  The truth is, I didn’t know if he would remember me after all he had been through since the last time I saw him.  But he seemed to upon sight once he arrived and met with a small group of people responsible for the event at CTL Aerospace.  When it came time for him to greet me, his wife was already speaking with me. I wanted an ice breaker.  After all, he has met many people over the last couple of years and spent his time helping campaign for Trump, hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, and creating D.O.G.E. with Elon Musk.  So, to start our conversation, I showed him a card he gave me four years ago, which everyone has been asking about.  And when he saw it, he laughed.  He and his wife instantly knew what it was, and it kicked off a nice conversation about his personal political journey, which started at CTL Aerospace five years earlier. 

The card in question was a little promo thing he did for his book Woke Inc, which went on to be a game-changing bestseller, as I thought it would at the time.  Vivek was really one of the first in the country to figure out just how dangerous woke politics was, and the great Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix invited me to come to a special launch of his new book at the Middletown Republican Party Headquarters.  Vivek was trying out his messaging for a national campaign that would encompass Fox News, specifically Tucker Carlson, so he was trying out his platform to a kind of test showing in his hometown of Butler County, Ohio.  But that isn’t where the story started, as Vivek told me the same story he said at the governor’s announcement and why he wanted to return to CTL Aerospace to make his big pitch.  A year earlier, from the book launch, where all he had to give out was that card, because the book hadn’t officially come out for another three months at that point, I had set up a rally in support of President Trump.  He was in his last year in office and was starting to run again for a second term.  And Democrats were entrenched in impeaching him and trying to use the Russian story to knock him off.  So I, along with several other prominent Butler County Republicans set up a rally to support Trump during a very dark period, and the rally was at CTL Aerospace which many thought was bold, to politically stick their necks out to show open support for President Trump when everyeone else in the world was running away.

J.D. Vance was still coming off his popular book The Hillbilly Elegy and was getting attention wherever he went, and he already knew Nancy Nix, who of course was coming to the rally I was putting on.  And as the story goes, the future Vice President wanted Nancy to introduce a friend of his, Vivek Ramaswamy, to the world of politics because he was stepping away from a CEO job he had been doing at the time and was looking for something new to wrap his brilliant mind into next.  So he came to the rally, got a good taste of politics, and saw an anti-woke company that was not afraid to tell the world at the time.  Vivek told me a year later that the rally helped him define a virus he and his wife had been considering curing.  Not a disease of the body, but one of the mind, wokeness.  After that CTL rally, he sat down and refined those ideas into the now famous book, Woke Inc. There were many people in the audience that day at that rally, so I didn’t know Vivek from any other face in the crowd.  But a year later, as he explained, he had written his book and was pitching it to a hometown crowd before going nationwide with a more extensive campaign.  But my joke to him then was that he was doing a book launch without a book because it wasn’t out yet.  But he did bring little cards with the cover printed on it.  I sat in the front row, because I love new books, and he gave me one of those cards and signed it.  And I looked at it and joked, “Is that it?”  Because I wanted an actual book to read, not just a silly little card. 

Well, it was a pretty good story, and I kept that card as a bookmark in some of my other books in my library.  A year after the Middletown event, I saw Vivek again at a Lincoln Dinner, and we were all in the VIP section as he was scheduled to speak that night.  Mike Pompeo was back there too, with a bunch of my personal friends, so it was a festive environment.  But I didn’t forget about the joke between Vivek and me, so I brought a copy of his book, Woke Inc, that I had long since read.  I got it for him to sign, which he did, and we joked about that card.  So now fast forward to three years after that, and Vivek was coming back to CTL Aerospace to make his governor announcement, and I pulled out that card for our greeting, curious as to whether he would remember all those events.  I didn’t want it to be weird for him to wonder, after seeing so many faces on his journey of running for President and traveling all over the United States, to see me and wonder how he knew me.  So I showed him that card before we even shook hands, and our conversation picked up exactly where it had last resided, and we had a lot of fun with the topic.  People watching and seeing all the pictures have been wondering what the story of the card was, how Vivek Ramaswamy stepped into politics to contribute his massive brain to the cause of freedom along the trajectory of the MAGA movement.  But I was there initially and played a part in his journey and was happy to see him doing good things with it.  You never know who might be in the audience when you host a rally or write articles like these daily.  But I have found many Vivek Ramaswamys out there thinking about doing something significant with their lives; sometimes, they need someone to hold the flashlight in the right direction so they can find their way to it.  And things cascade from there, so doing things is always important.  Vivek will be a great governor in Ohio and, undoubtedly, a great president after that.  He will do a lot of great things in the years to come.  And it will be because he is good and is willing to do all the hard work.  But sometimes great things happen just because of a little card and a story that grows with it.  That is the story of the card I have kept and the movement it launched, with the efforts of many people brought together with the common bond of just wanting to do the right thing. I’m very proud of Vivek Ramaswamy; he’s the right guy at the right time for all the right reasons and when you see things like this you can see the hidden hand of God working from behind a veil with a yearning for good things to happen with little miracles that make no sense under any other condition.  And I wouldn’t say that anything in this story is a miracle.  But what it is only happens when people refuse to bend the knee to darkness, and people so inclined to resist come together under a common cause and change the world, one little card at a time.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Apoorva Ramasway is a Really Good Person: One of the big reasons to support Vivek Ramaswamy for governor of Ohio

There was never any question about supporting Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of the State of Ohio.  But after meeting with him at his launch ceremony in West Chester, Ohio, I feel even better about it.  Of course, he is a great talent that can speak the peel off an orange.  But so can a lot of con artists.  The question everyone always wants to know about these kinds of things is how can they know they can trust him?  What makes a person trustworthy, even if they have the gift of gab?  After all, there are a lot of salespeople out there who can sell you just about anything who aren’t worth 2 cents as people.  So what makes Vivek Ramaswamy a good person, good enough to be made Governor of the State of Ohio?  Well, I have a proven tactic that I use to qualify people, especially adult people, that has worked for me over the years: I measure a person’s worth based on what kind of spouse they have.  They can sell pretty words to the public all day, but if they partner with a terrible person as a spouse, you should always question the person’s validity.  As a general rule, good people tend to attract other good people.  And bad, toxic people tend to do the same.  You don’t often find a toxic person choosing to be married to a high-quality person.  They are attached to them for a reason.  So judging a person based on the worth of their spouse is quite good as an accurate measurement, and I am thrilled to say that Vivek Ramaswamy’s wife is top-class and a very good person. Upon meeting Apoorva Ramaswamy, I found that I liked Vivek even more.  They are a nice couple who work well together in ways that are bigger than the jobs they do in life.

I don’t mind saying it, and there are certainly more that I can think of, but at this Vivek Ramaswamy event were some very good friends of mine who were part of setting up everything in the background.  And we are friends for a reason that goes beyond political considerations.  I know a lot of people, but I put more trust in these people for a lot of reasons, most of which start with their spouses.  For instance, when people ask me, “How can you trust George Lang?  He’s a RINO establishment figure.”  I can say to them that I can trust him in ways I wouldn’t trust other people, largely because of what I know him that is different from other people, especially people in a decisive Senate role.  Why George?  He has a wonderful wife in Debbie, who is just as solid as a person can get.  They are a good couple, and they are at an age where they travel a lot, and the fruits of a lot of hard work are emerging, and they are living a good life.  They work well together, and things were not always as good as they are now.  I remember when the political left was trying to throw George in jail just for knowing John Boehner.  Even in the toughest of times, Debbie has always been loyal to George, and as a couple, they are always trying to do the right thing, and I have come to know both of them pretty well over the years in ways that far exceed politics.  If George Lang had never been a senator and never was again, he and his wife would still be friends with me and my wife.  They are good people to know.

And why do I like her so much? People always ask me about Nancy Nix.  Well, what’s not to like?  She is as good as they get.  She comes across as a good person as a politician due to her many sincere desires for the world to be a better place, and I have come to know her over the years as a person with profound convictions toward biblical goodness.  But I’ll say that her husband Bob Leshnak is perfect for her.  Sometimes, it takes a while to find people who can work with them instead of against them.  When you are a person like Nancy who is naturally attractive and has a very outward projecting personality, you can attract a lot of bar flies.  But as a naturally good person from a good family, she knows how to sort through all that to find a great spouse in Bob.  He is good for her and doesn’t work against her, and they just come out as a good couple when you talk to them in any setting.  How can people be expected to manage your government financially or ethically if they can’t manage their own homes?  I could say that I know Fran DeWine a bit, enough to see that she makes the current governor of Ohio a far better person than he would otherwise be.  They are childhood sweethearts, which makes him a person that can at least be brought to reason because he has managed a long marriage to a good person.  I have met Melania Trump on several occasions and always said she is the key to why President Trump has become the kind of good person he is at this stage.  Spouses say a lot about the people we know, publicly. 

At Vivek’s West Chester event, I got to talk to him in great detail, but that wasn’t new.  I could also walk around with his wife and talk to her one-on-one.  And I found it interesting that she had a good relationship with Representative Jennifer Gross, who is too Tea Party for many people.  It says a lot about Apoorva in a good way and about Vivek with the doors closed.  Apoorva was a very classy woman, full of life and spirit, and I kept thinking she would be an ideal First Lady of Ohio.  She comes across well in all the right ways.  But what is most apparent is that she and Vivek are a power couple that feeds off each other.  We’re not talking about a couple of people climbing through social power to achieve a status through won elections.  These people are personally good and want to share that with others in a leadership way.  This is a much different set of standards than the traditional power couple that only share their desire for public power, and once that is not in their lives through a lost election or bad financial times, their relationship breaks apart.  Spouses aren’t helping each other if they plot divorce behind their spouses’ backs and are always jealous of the other people in their lives because they are insecure in the foundations of their relationship.  When you meet people who have people in their lives that they are building families with and who are willing to walk through all the fires of life together, you can know that there are unique qualities you can trust in them as public servants.  And that is undoubtedly the case for Vivek Ramaswamy and his wife, Apoorva.  They will still be a good couple once the days of politics are done, a few decades from now.  They will be defined by what they do together rather than what they convince people to give them in the form of trust and social management.  They are good because they are good, and they work together, which is the best trait of all.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Dave Yost Has No Chance: Calling me a fraud won’t make an unlikable person appealing

I support Vivek Ramaswamy for the Governor of Ohio in any way possible.  I was all in before I had a chance to talk to him the other day, and after spending some time with him, I’m more convinced than ever.  For me, he’s like getting Trump to run Ohio.  But Vivek is great on his own, and he is what I would call the next generation of MAGA political candidates.  I have liked Dave Yost, the current attorney general.  But there are a lot of reservations that put him in the clear RINO category.  In a head-to-head matchup between Yost and Ramaswamy, I see it coming out like it did in 2016 with Trump against Jeb Bush.  And in the end, I think a political fight with Vivek Ramaswamy will destroy the career of Dave Yost, and I didn’t want to see that, at least until they sent me a nasty letter the other day complaining about my support of Vivek through a video I did.  I usually get a lot of hate mail, and I never come close to answering them all, but this one was different due to the content of the political fight to come, and it changed any sympathy I had for Dave Yost into primal aggression and a desire to see him destroyed.  I have been keeping thoughts about Dave Yost and what he did to the former Butler County Auditor Roger Reynolds tucked away, and this whole event resurrected it for me as a primary concern.  I’m not running for office, so I don’t have to be as nice as Vivek wants to be to his political enemies.  And as good as he is, he’s going to win the governor race of Ohio without too much difficulty.  But as I have done in regard to Trump, reporting things in context so people can feel good about voting for Ramaswamy when critics say otherwise is something I will certainly do for the future Governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy.  

So the Yost Campaign insinuated that I’m some fraud for the video I did discussing the announcement of running for governor by Vivek Ramaswamy a day before the event occurred.  They thought that was a misleading tactic because I couldn’t have possibly known that the event would be packed with supporters on the day before the event occurred.  Now, I have a lot of experience with the media, and if I wasn’t good at so many other things, I would probably have carved out a career in media myself.  But to be truthful, and I know this from many friends in the media that I have who were major superstars, the pay isn’t that great.  So I do a lot of other things; media for me is for the good of it.  Not the pay of it.  But it’s common practice to pre-write articles before a deadline and even to shoot a promo video ahead of an event when you want the material to reach audiences near or right after the event you are discussing.  And that was the case here.  In West Chester, Ohio, at CTL Aerospace, we had a big announcement rally for Vivek Ramaswamy that ended around 6:30 PM.  My blog is read daily by many people who want to know my thoughts on the latest topic. It goes up every day at 7 PM.  So I had to have most of it ready to go to beat my deadline.  I could adjust any changes to the reporting beforehand.  But for that article and video, I talked about the things that I knew were going to be true.  And I would know because I was one of the organizers of the event.  

A pretty dumb idea on their part. But it’s a free world.

Before the weekend of Vivek’s announcement on the following Monday, the 24th of February, I knew that there were 1200 RSVPs who had gone online to indicate they were coming and to be put on the list.  I also knew the space we had set up for Vivek was only supposed to hold 500 people.  So, doing the video announcement I did for the event, I knew it would be very crowded.  And as it turned out, it was worse than I said.  There was a line down and around the building and as people were trying to get in I had more than 500 text messages and phone calls between the hour of 4 PM and 5 PM, which I couldn’t take, because I was talking to Vivek Ramaswamy along with a few other people about what was going to happen during his speech.  It took me two days after the rally to answer most of them.  I never got to some because I wasn’t sure who they all were. But the ones I did know, I eventually, at least, answered.  I was at the Dave Yost announcement for Governor when he did it at the Elks Club near my home in Liberty Township, and it was nothing like this.  Dave had difficulty getting more than seven or eight people to stand in line to get a picture with him.  There may have been a few hundred people who came; honestly, I felt sorry for him. To support him, which I planned to do until Vivek came along, I knew that Dave Yost would have a significant enthusiasm problem.  He just wasn’t very exciting.  He acted like an out-of-touch politician who put on a cowboy hat to appeal to the meat-and-potato people, but he had an assumption of doing the time and a pretention of entitlement that he deserved to be Governor and that the Republican party owed it to him.

Senator Lang, and Secretary of State Frank LaRose endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy at CTL Aerospace

There is a lot of good stuff to discuss regarding Vivek Ramaswamy, and I certainly will.  I’ve met him several times, and at this event, he had a good memory of some of our history together.  The reason he chose CTL Aerospace is because of a story he shares with me, and Nancy Nix, George Lang and a few others at the start of his decision to get into politics, which I knew before his speech, was why he was coming back to start his run for governor at that location.  So we had a good talk, and I got to know his wife a bit more than in the past, and let me say, she is solid goodness in every way you can imagine.  She is sharp and very friendly.  I like the Ramaswamys as a family and as people, and it is those kind of people, if they want to, who should be in tough jobs like the Governor of Ohio.  Vivek is the kind of political figure I have been looking for in these positions for years, so I’m going to get fully behind his campaign, and that’s why I was one of the event coordinators and venue providers.  I personally liked Vivek before his announcement, in a very personal way.  And I am more supportive after hearing his speech if possible.  And to my way of thinking, Vivek is a lot nicer than I am.  And I would say a lot more forgiving; anybody who gets in the way of him running Ohio must be destroyed.  And if Dave Yost wants to go there, or his not very smart people, then that’s on them.  They can deal with the aftermath. 

Not to get into personal details, I normally don’t talk about things I say in private with people, but this is probably important in regard to Vivek Ramaswamy.  When we were talking, he asked me, “Rich, what do you want from me?”  I said to him, “I want 16 years out of you.  8 years as governor of Ohio.  And 8 years as President of the United States.  And at the end of it, you won’t yet be 60.  That sounds like a pretty good life to me.”  And he said, “Yes it does, let’s see how all this goes.”  And to all that, I will do my part to help see that it all goes well.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Governor Rally at CTL Aerospace: Over a thousand people showed up to see Trump’s pick for Ohio

There’s a whole story on this, that is worth telling on its own.

It was never a question for me if Vivek Ramaswamy was running for office; now that Trump has regained the White House, I’m all in.  He is a unique talent and part of what I consider a new generation of political class.  He’s been close to Trump for several years now and as an original D.O.G.E. founding member, he is driven by the same kind of concern for American preservation as Elon Musk.  So when I got a call to help connect the dots for Vivek’s announcement for governor, I was immediately supportive and excited to lend that support.  When I was showing Vivek’s coordinators possible sites to host an announcement rally, I took them to a spot that would hold around 2000 people, which they thought was ambitious.  They were looking for something more intimate, for around 500 people.  After all, this was just a governor’s announcement race for a state.  How many people could show up?  Before Vivek got into the gubernatorial race, I had supported David Yost, the current Attorney General.  Yost is a good guy and, under normal conditions, would be a good pick as an office holder.  However, these are not normal conditions, and we are looking for an exceptional officeholder because George Lang’s Business First Caucus has planted the seeds for Ohio to become the number one economy.  And knowing what I do about Trump, he has put eyes on Ohio to go from a rust belt state to a tech giant quickly.  So, many things are lining up to unleash greatness that isn’t being discussed on the nightly news.  And I knew before he did it that Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to run for governor of Ohio and would be stepping away from D.O.G.E., from people at Mar-a-Lago who told me in early December of 2024. 

So, I wasn’t surprised to get the call from Vivek Ramaswamy to make his big announcement at CTL Aerospace.  There’s a backstory to it that could fill a book, but when my phone rang, I was somewhat expecting it.  So we settled on a spot with his coordinators to hold around 500 people because that would be considered a good crowd for something like this.  But within a few days, my thoughts about 2000 people suddenly got much more attention.  The RSVP for the event quickly shot to over 1000 people; by the time everything started at 4:30 PM, there were people everywhere.  It was more like a Trump rally than anything else.  Seeing all this, I instantly felt a little sorry for David Yost, the only GOP challenger to Vivek for that governor seat.  When I was at his launch announcement, it was hard even to set up a photo line because there weren’t many people.  I attributed it to being too far out; Yost wanted to stake his claim early to ward off possible challengers.  But with Vivek in the race, Yost doesn’t have any chance.  Without question, Trump wants Vivek Ramaswamy to run for governor of Ohio, so any endorsements going to anybody will go in that direction.  Yost is holding on to hope that because Trump was supportive of him in the past, he would support him for a run for governor.  No, Vivek is Trump’s guy, and he has the support of the MAGA crowd, who showed up to a spillover event to put their excitement toward an exciting opportunity.  And it turned out to be quite a media spectacle that traveled quickly around the world.

I don’t talk about it much; my approach to all these things has been to put my head down, push through the opposition, and defeat my political enemies.  I’ve been doing these things for a long time, and as I was telling old war stories to the organizers of Vivek’s event because it was all about the backstory of when Vivek came to CTL Aerospace five years before when almost nobody knew who he was, and I was very involved in the Tea Party, Trump didn’t always get these massive crowds.  I would see Trump here and there as a member of the Reform Party, and he’d have a decent crowd at those events because he was on television and had written a few books.  But it was nothing like what we saw with his GOP presidential run in 2016, 2020, and 2024.  And I was seeing the same kind of trajectory for Vivek Ramaswamy.  We’re not discussing just four years of Trump in the White House representing the MAGA movement.  We’re looking at those four years, plus another 16 years between Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance, who could easily make all the Executive Orders that Trump has been signing into law.  This was all about momentum and planning for the future.  Not a short-term pop, Vivek would apply what he would do as a future president to the State of Ohio to show the world what it could look like.  At this point, he had written four great books about economic health in society in general, and he was eager to put all that into practice.  And that was being announced at CTL Aerospace in West Chester, Ohio, for the world to see. 

As I talked to people a few nights earlier at the Nancy Nix fundraiser, I was given a hard time because I wasn’t wearing my cowboy hat—especially from Sheriff Jones.  Usually, at those kinds of events, two people wear cowboy hats: Jones and myself.  But this time, people noticed I just showed up in my suit, not some ostentatious gunslinger outfit.  And they wanted to know why.  Well, that’s because we are winning, and when you are in such a condition, you don’t have to sell ambition to people; they are already there.  It is fun for a change to see all these great things happening, with Trump every day, with Elon Musk, and now with Vivek Ramaswamy essentially being governor of Ohio, where all of George Lang’s challenging work will finally pay off for the people of the formally known rust belt state.  As I explained my lack of a hat, I offered everyone a feeling of contentment with where our nation was going.  The woke monsters of our world have not gone away, but they have been defeated, and people are showing that they have no desire to return to their ominous tyranny.  And I think that people like Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio Statehouse, then in the future White House, will take what Trump has done and expand on it for a goodness nobody can yet see.  But I see it.  I had significant time with Vivek at this West Chester event, and I can see it in his eyes.  Yes, we have many good things coming, and people see them.  It showed up in the massive crowd at the West Chester announcement, and I feel content for the first time in years as if all the work everyone puts into these kinds of things was suddenly worth it.  And as to my lack of a hat, it’s not that I will change my appearance publicly.  But sometimes, I want to enjoy myself, which I did at Nancy’s event and Vivek Ramaswamy’s announcement rally.  Great things are coming, and it feels good to witness them up close and personally, and to just take it all in and enjoy the journey.

Dave Yost, Amy Acton, or anybody, would not get a line like this. Vivek is the runaway favorite. The crowd was very Trump like.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

I Endorse Michael Ryan for Butler County Commissioner: A wonderful future if only we have the courage to embrace it

I thought it was going to be a secret for a while, but it was announced at the Nancy Nix fundraiser on February 21st, 2025, that Michael Ryan, the Hamilton City Council member and Vice Mayor, was planning to run for one of the commissioner openings that were coming up in November of 2026.  I have felt for a long time that if only T.C. Rogers, one of the current commissioners in Butler County, had another friendly vote, lots of good things could happen for a community that has over 400,000 people and has the potential for some of the best economic output anywhere in the United States, or even the world for that matter.  If another commissioner could help with the critical free market philosophy, lots of upward mobility for a lot of people would be created.  Upon hearing this news, I first thought that Michael would be a perfect replacement for the current commissioner, Cindy Carpenter.  I haven’t been a fan of hers since she started, but her career path fell off the road last year when she was caught campaigning for a Democrat in Middletown, Ohio.   There is a lot of talk about Cindy winning eight straight elections even though she has a lot of detractors in the Republican Party.  I would argue that the reason she holds up so well to Democrat challengers is because she is essentially a Democrat who puts an “R” next to her name to win elections in a very conservative county.  I think this campaigning in Middletown for Democrats thing will hurt her now in ways she’s not used to, so I think she’s very vulnerable.   We’re in a new day of politics, and putting up with these RINOs has been something that Central Committees have not been willing to do, especially when they have an opportunity to get a MAGA type of officeholder.  And that is precisely what Michael V. Ryan is.

My wife has been very busy with family business lately.  To run a family well takes a massive commitment sometimes, and my wife is the kind of person who will drop everything at the drop of a hat to help my two daughters with life as it’s happening.  This leaves me going to some of these vital community functions by myself a lot.  And at Nancy’s fundraiser, I talked too much to too many people to find a seat in the vast crowd.  Nancy Nix always does a great job with these events, which are always well-attended.  On this particular evening, it was being held at the Elks Club in Liberty Township, which is a favorite venue of mine.  It holds a lot of people, and she always brings in big-time comedy acts to entertain people during a nice dinner provided by the Spinning Fork restaurant that facilitates the club.  The comedians were Jeff Jena, Dave Dugan, and Lou Santini, so they were not second-rate acts, so seating had some priority.  If my wife had been with me, we would have found a seat and held it near people we usually associate with.  But Jeff Jena was acting as the master of ceremonies, and he was getting impatient. People were still talking as it was time to serve dinner and start the show.  So I needed to stop shindigging and get to a seat.  I had been talking to Michael Ryan about several county and city topics, and he saw my dilemma and said that I could sit with him and his wife, along with others from city councils in not just Hamilton but also nearby Middletown. 

Michael and I have had a lot of discussions over the years about the potential of Butler County, and as a younger guy, he has reminded me of a lot of up-and-coming political people who are formulating the MAGA movement that is emerging behind Trump’s leadership in the Executive Branch, which includes J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Bernie Moreno.  These are different kinds of brilliant people who could be successful in any field they want to be in.  However, a personality type is emerging that is quite noticeable, and Michael Ryan, who I call “young” at 41 years old, has a lot of good stuff to give.  Once I heard that he was planning to run for that Butler County Commissioner seat that Cindy Carpenter occupied, I got excited and decided to get behind his campaign and help however I could.  As he and I were talking about his upcoming campaign, shortly after Nancy Nix gave him a full endorsement in front of the crowd that caused a little controversy, in a good way, he kept reminding me of a different version of Vivek Ramaswamy. I met Vivek years ago through Nancy Nix and a few other places at VIP events, such as a time with Mike Pompeo and again as he prepared to announce his race for Governor of Ohio.  Leading up to Nancy’s fundraiser, I was coordinating that big announcement with Vivek at CTL Aerospace, and I noted how different this new generation of politicians was as opposed to the past before Trump changed politics forever.  Michael Ryan fits this new, young, ambitious type of politician who runs toward capitalism, not away from it as Cindy Carpenter has all these years. 

So I appreciated Michael and his very nice wife Amanda letting me share in their date night as a third wheel.  We talked about many incredible opportunities for Butler County if only someone like him could fill that critical seat.  We spent a lot of time discussing the vertical taxi market, which I have been talking about with everyone with a mind to listen.  A lot of people haven’t yet put all the dots together, but Joby Aviation is right up the road of the aviation corridor of I-75 that Vivek Ramaswamy is planning to talk a lot about as his run for governor, and they are building eVTOL aircraft that are ready to go right now.  I told everyone months ago how it was going to go down. They are only waiting for regulation approval and can start shipping these air taxi vehicles worldwide.  China and Abu Dhabi are the first to market as they have much fewer regulatory environments to slow them down.  However, under the Trump administration, I’m just saying that those barriers to the United States will be removed.  And someone like Michael Ryan is just the kind of person with the vision to put their arms around it and bring top tech innovation to Butler County as a leader of this emerging new technology.  He understands the value of that kind of innovation, but that’s not the only reason I like Michael.  He’s just a good person who wants to do good things, and I enjoyed spending time with him and his wife, along with the table of fellow council members and community managers.  Michael and Amanda are the kind of people you want to see providing leadership and opportunity to people hungry for it, and Butler County is a prime place to have the most vibrant economy in a state that is going to be Trump’s example of turning a rust belt into a tech giant.  From my experience with the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign for governor, I know his plans for the state.  And to cascade off that, Butler County can be the leader of the state to have the best opportunities that many people can’t yet possibly imagine.  And with a commissioner like Michael Ryan, even the wildest dreams of the most optimistic people can’t even be imagined because such greatness has never yet been seen among the human race. But that opportunity is coming at us very soon, with Vivek Ramaswamy as Ohio Governor and Michael Ryan as Butler County Commissioner. 

Oh, and regarding Joby Aviation and why Abu Dhabi is the current leader in the eVTOL market. Joby’s S4 aircraft, which hauls a pilot and four passengers at 200 mph with a 100-mile range, could slash the two-hour car slog from Abu Dhabi to Dubai to a breezy 30 minutes—no emissions, and much less noise than a chopper. They’re tying this into Abu Dhabi’s Smart and Autonomous Vehicles Industry (SAVI) cluster, a big local initiative to lead in next-gen transport. Joby’s already got exclusive rights to operate in Dubai starting as early as 2025, and this Abu Dhabi move opens the door for zippy inter-emirate trips. They’ve been showing off the aircraft at events like DRIFTx in Yas Marina, flexing their tech to seal the deal.  This is not science fiction.  The only thing stopping us in the United States is having the kind of politicians who can take away the barriers to market saturation currently held up to the speed of slow government left to us by Joe Biden and Obama’s years of bureaucratic infrastructure. The eVTOL is the future of transportation, much more important than building any new highway or railroad.  And Butler County, Ohio can lead America if only it has the right politicians who can make it happen.  The money and investment are just waiting for the pin-headed politicians like Cindy Carpenter to get out of the way.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Family is the First and Most Important Form of Government: The Truths of Vivek Ramaswamy

You might have noticed a theme with the incoming Trump administration.  It was very obvious at the Daytona 500, where Trump walked around the track with his granddaughter.  Or with Elon Musk bringing his children into the Oval Office to play while doing press conferences.  I told my very good friend, Senator George Lang, how I thought so much about how he and his wife work together so well and enjoy doing many things as a couple.  A lot of people don’t get to see that side of him, but George has a great family. They love their kids and are just good people from the ground up.  And that seems to be a constant theme regarding people I tend to think are doing a good job in government; they do a good job in their homes, starting there.  That was certainly the message with J.D. Vance at the inauguration, where his children were crawling all over the place during the parade ceremonies.  It was very nice to see.  As I was reading Vivek Ramaswamy’s new book Truths recently, ahead of a big event with him where he is going to announce he’s running for governor of Ohio, he spent a whole chapter on the topic of family and how important it is to the constructs of a good society and good government.  In almost every case, you can’t expect to govern other people well if you don’t have a good family life.  So more and more, the way to sell good government to people is to show everyone that you know how to run a good family, because it all starts in the home.  We have been lied to when it has been suggested otherwise.  To be Great Again, America needs to make families great again as the first layer of good government; from there, everything else flows forward. 

I tell my wife every year that it is her birthday, in late February, to which I always hold my breath and which I most look forward to.  I’m not crazy about the weeks between Christmas and her birthday.  I enjoy the holiday season–Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year.  There is a lot of optimism that the human race has created for itself during that time of year, and I do love it.  But once the cold of winter hits and there are several weeks of very short days of daylight, I sort of hold my breath for her birthday, which always comes after it, the optimism of spring.  So we usually do something fun as a family for her birthday as a mile marker through a winter hard won.  This year, we celebrated by going to the Fuji House at Bridgewater Falls, and we had a wonderful evening there as a family with my kids and their kids.  It was her pick; it’s an open hibachi-style Japanese place where they cook in front of you.  I get to do that a lot. I’ve been to Japan a few times recently, and they do a lot of that cooking style there, so I’ve seen it firsthand. I have to say, they do a great job at the Fuji House.  It’s the only place my wife wanted to go for her birthday dinner, and everyone had a great time together.  The little kids loved it.  My kids enjoyed the treat, as they work hard, and life has a way of chipping away at people in their thirties and forties, they needed the break.  So my wife’s instincts were correct on that particular place on that particular night.  One thing you always get with Japanese society, in any form, is that they are very family-friendly, and the Fuji House in Butler County, Ohio, is undoubtedly family-oriented, making it fun for everyone. 

As I was watching our cook doing his warrior-like slicing up of our food with fire dancing all around in front of us, I kept thinking about Vivek’s book, about Trump and his kids and grandkids, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, my friend George and his wife Debbie and there isn’t any way to hide it.  Family is the first foundation for everything; you can’t have a culture of success without it.  Everything starts at home.  You manage your family well.  Only then can you think of managing anything in your community.  I know most of the trustees in the communities I work with, and I can say that in all their cases, family is essential to them.  Most of them have functional relationships with their spouses.  If you control that, you can think about state government.  Then, from there, the federal government.  And if there is anything left after all that, you can think about what’s happening in the world.  But never do any of those things at the expense of your family.  Family is everything, and any experiment from the past that has been said otherwise is a catastrophic failure, and we are paying for it now on many levels.  Sitting there watching our cook put all that well-prepared food on our plate for us to eat with chopsticks, I thought about all the great family moments we have had over the years, and really, those are the only things that ever mattered.  I’ve done many neat things, but time with our family has been the most important.  When I talk about good government and its needs, I always utter it from the perspective of a good family foundation first.

All suggestions otherwise have been wrong and should be viewed as an attack on our basic social structure.  Anything that attacks the pursuit of a happy family attacks the basic premise of values in that culture.  Thinking more about our own experiences, especially over this last decade, as we have traveled a lot as a family, usually with a caravan of RV campers, we have had many great experiences that indeed show up in the little children.  And that is the task of someone like Trump to give his grandkids an idea of what a good life should look like.  Otherwise, how would they know?  If you can’t have a good life at home with your family, how will you do it for community members, state, or nation?  That is what the borderless world people have gotten wrong from the beginning; they are trying to erode this essential Truth, as Vivek Ramaswamy calls it.  The government doesn’t start from the world as a global citizen and then work down to the family.  It’s the complete opposite, which is why Disney as a company has been failing.  They used to understand the family first concept.  But through radicalized politics, they tried to turn that basic structure on its head, attack the premise of family membership, and replace it with being a global citizen.  And that’s just wrong at every level.  So, I again enjoyed my wife’s birthday and dinner with our family to celebrate it.  There was a time not that long ago when we all got on a plane and flew to London to have her birthday dinner at Chef Ramsey’s premier restaurant in Chelsea, which was fantastic.  But in the scheme of things, Fuji House was better.  Not so much in the quality of food, but in the atmosphere.  The family-friendly environment there was just conducive to a good evening; many families there doing the same thing we were, and I saw a lot of evidence of good government in the home and people ready to take those values into their community, which was terrific.  There is hope for the world yet–through the children.  And if the adults let them down, that is a real tragedy.  And the signs of a future lousy government. 

We did it last year; I had just stepped off a plane from Japan.  And I was going to take our whole family to Disney World.  We were planning to spend a whole week at the Fort Wilderness Campground.  It’s a trip I had wanted to do before the grandkids got too old for Disney.  And I wanted them to experience it before the park started to fall off the rails due to their woke politics.  Since I was traveling late from Japan, the rest of my family headed to a little campsite in Georgia with their RV, and the agreement was that my wife and I would meet them there, just south of Atlanta.   I stepped off the 14-hour plane ride from Tokyo and literally got right into our SUV to pull our RV trailer to that Georgia campsite to catch up with my kids, who were already there, to drive 8 hours per day over the next couple of days.  And that evening, when we met up at a table set up between our two RVs, I brought them little treasures from Japan, and we had a great evening together, ahead of a week at Disney World and a Park Hopper pass to all four of their amusement parks for the week.  It was a wonderful day, the best we could ever hope for in a government experience.  Seeing it firsthand, I can say that I know what it looks like and what other people should be doing to get to similar happy places.  And it’s not up for debate. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Lets Talk About The Future Governor of Ohio: Vivek Ramaswamy announces a great opportunity in West Chester

These opportunities don’t come along too often when people like Vivek Ramaswamy want to run for governor on a political path that will entail a lot of high offices.  But to be governor of Ohio at this particular juncture in history is quite a remarkable idea.  Something that just a few months ago didn’t seem possible.  Yet it is true; I know it is because I am playing a role in sponsoring this announcement by Vivek on February 24th at 5:30 PM in West Chester.  And I am thrilled to be a part of it because I like Vivek Ramaswamy.  I would have thought he would be directly involved in the Trump administration after the President was elected to a second term.  Vivek Ramaswamy was set to partner directly with Elon Musk to run D.O.G.E., which is the hottest thing in the world right now.  So, it would have been a perfect next chapter for Vivek Ramaswamy.  However, in the weeks before Christmas, some very good friends of mine, who are very close to Vivek, told me what was cooking down at Mar-a-Lago with Trump wanting to clear the decks for Vivek to run for Governor of Ohio, and that was exciting news indeed, and I was instantly supportive.  I thought it was a good move for DeWine to appoint Jon Husted to J.D. Vance’s senate seat because now J.D. was in the White House with Trump. Husted had wanted to run for governor, but I supported David Yost instead.  But then, Vivek Ramaswamy didn’t look like he would be available at that Ohio high office.  However, a mission is going on in the background to make Ohio no longer a “rust belt” state but the center of the technological universe, starting with aviation and aerospace, then migrating to computer chips and fuel production.  So it didn’t take me long to grab on to this opportunity, which was a chance of a lifetime to get an excellent MAGA governor in Ohio and to do big things that had not been possible up to now.

I like David Yost, the current attorney general.  I liked the idea of a law and order governor who would be hard on crime and support the Trump administration’s border policies.  Yost is a big guy, the last time I saw him personally, he was wearing a big cowboy hat, and I loved the idea of him being an option for governor.  But for all things Ohio, Vivek also gives us a great law and order presence, and we get all the economic goodies, too.  It’s nothing against David Yost, but everyone has a role that they are good at, and with Vivek, he’ll be able to cheerlead along projects that are unique to him on the tech side of things.  Ramaswamy is a new generation of political figures who are self-made and energetic, working feverishly around the clock to do great things.  David Yost is a more traditional politician.  He’d be much better than the current Mike DeWine, but he wouldn’t be much different from the governors we’ve had.  He’s not Vivek Ramaswamy, who is probably the best orator in the world right now.  And he has a long runway.  I love seeing people in his age bracket, not yet 40, poised to do these big jobs because it’s the juice for a good living cascading off their administrations.  Not that David Yost is a one-trick pony; there is much to say about law and order.  But Vivek Ramaswamy is the whole racehorse, which is a safe bet on a successful race.  Knowing what I do about the great things in the background that are part of Senator Lang’s business first caucus, this opportunity with Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t come along in too many lifetimes. 

I want to see Dave Yost get behind Vivek and do something that he is specifically good at, such as a continuation of law and order enforcement.  There are plenty of good things to do, and I don’t want to see Yost damaged politically in a run against Vivek.  There’s just no reason for that other than ego.  Everyone should find their way in this MAGA movement.  But Yost is crazy if he thinks Trump will endorse him over Vivek Ramaswamy.  There is no reason to have anybody in the MAGA movement embarrassed because there are plenty of jobs for everyone.  There is no scenario where David Yost is on a debate stage with Vivek Ramaswamy, and Yost doesn’t come out on the losing end.  And because I like Yost personally, I don’t want to see that happen to him.  Vivek will win the GOP nomination in Ohio easily, and he will then have to take on from the Democrats the old subject of millions and millions of words that I have written about her, Amy Acton, who has announced that she too is running for Governor.  Which I think is hilarious.  But she’s the best that Democrats have, which is another problem.  She must be tone-deaf not to understand how much people in Ohio hate her after what she did with COVID-19.  The pot-smoking hippie chick persona she has will not play well, as people have tried to forget about her for all her ridiculous Covid lockdowns.  Here she goes, wanting to remind everyone of her role, which is one of the greatest mistakes Ohio has ever experienced.  She cost Ohio billions of dollars and a lot of misery; she’s the opposite of a personality like Vivek Ramaswamy. 

If you want to see Vivek in person, just register at the link below:

https://www.vivekannouncement.com/

Also, I think Amy Acton plays better with sympathetic voters who believe in second chances on a stage with David Yost, who comes across as too stoic than the compassionate Amy Acton.  Many women will undoubtedly choose Amy Acton over David Yost because that’s how emotional voters vote.  It’s probably why Amy Acton thinks that enough time has passed since the Covid disaster, and now, she can get back out and show herself to the world again.  But on a debate stage with Vivek Ramaswamy, there is no way she can win anything.  She has too much baggage, and she’s too slow, and Vivek could decimate her with a smile on his face and still give any supporter of her a reason to vote for him without feeling guilty about it.  It’s hard not to like Vivek, and he can debate anybody about anything without coming across as vicious and combative.  You don’t need to bash people over the head when you are as good as he is.  So Vivek Ramaswamy is in a class all by himself, and if you want to see him in person, just let me know before the 24th.  It’s not just a chance to see the future governor of Ohio, but I think a future President.  Vivek has a lot of runway ahead of him.  There’s room for J.D. Vance and other MAGA personalities, too.  I’d like to see them all tag team those efforts and not fight against each other, as I am suggesting, with David Yost getting behind Vivek’s run so that he can do different things that he’s good at.  The goal is to carry the MAGA movement to as many nationwide offices as far into the future as possible.  And for now, 8 years of Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio as governor could make our state a bigger economy than the country of Taiwan is now.  Bigger even.  But it takes the right people in the correct positions, and for this opportunity in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy is it.  I’m very excited to support him in this fabulous announcement.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Vivek Ramaswamy is Coming to West Chester to Announce He’s Running for Governor: ‘Truths’ are that Ohio can have the greatest economy

You might have heard that Vivek Ramaswamy will announce his run for governor in Cincinnati on February 24th, which I think is fantastic.  There is a long story to that, but needless to say, I’m happy to see that Vivek intends to bring to Ohio an economy that would rival the country of Taiwan.  When I first learned that Vivek was planning to run for governor with President Trump’s complete blessing, I was just a little excited by the prospect that the author of Woke Inc and three other similar books that have come out over the last few years was going to be the governor of a state I care about quite a lot.  I have never liked that Ohio was called a Rust Belt state, as if it were some washed-up carcass of years gone by.  I know Vivek a bit, as I’ve met him several times.  And I know many people who work closely with him, as very good friends.  From the first time I met him at the Middletown Republican Party headquarters at a small event where we could all talk to each other, I knew there was a lot very special about Vivek Ramaswamy.   I know what he wants to do and am very excited to see it.  Remember in December of 2024 when I told everyone about the Hyperloop in Monroe, Ohio, and longevity clinics to challenge traditional healthcare strategies? I said all those things knowing that Vivek intended to run for governor as a direct extension of the Trump administration.  That he was turning away from working with Elon Musk and D.O.G.E. to do this vital thing.  And now it’s going to be announced officially that he’s coming to his hometown to do something that I can only say could be spectacular for the State of Ohio. 

Knowing I would be a part of this announcement, I figured I’d catch up on his books, especially the last one, Truths.  I love Vivek’s books, but I didn’t read this last one as I usually would on the first day of publication or upon receiving an advanced copy because it came out in September of 2024, just a few weeks away from the biggest election of our lives.  It did a good job setting up what Trump’s next term should look like.  But I didn’t want to put the cart before the horse.  I had already read Peter Navarro’s book, which I thought would be similar to Vivek’s book at that point in the campaign, I was not nervous, but I was only thinking about getting Trump into the White House.  Then I’d catch up and think about how great it would be to do the many things Vivek outlined in his new book.  So, knowing that I would see him at his announcement, I wanted to tell him at least honestly what I thought of his book, so I picked it up and read it, and I absolutely loved it.  It was more refreshing to read a book like that, which essentially is about everything that Trump is doing in the White House at a feverish pace, in hindsight.  But I can’t say that I have enjoyed a book this much in recent memory because reading it before the election would have seemed like a remote fantasy.  But reading it after the election and seeing Trump do everything he’s doing, Vivek would know as he has been in and around the President for quite a while now, has been astonishing.  It was a pleasure to read Vivek’s Truths, knowing that we have a chance to make everything happen and then some.  Most of the time, books about politics complain about what is being portrayed to describe what could be.  But Vivek’s Truths is about what things are, Truths that are unshakable realities, and articulates the necessity to return to a more common sense world. 

Oddly enough, or maybe not so odd, I first met Vivek Ramaswamy through an introduction by Nancy Nix, the great auditor of Butler County.  And I wasn’t sure what to think of the very vivacious young man.  I sat in the front of the room just three or four feet from the future presidential candidate and now future governor and listened to his marvelous speech.  I think he’s probably the best orator in the world right now; there isn’t anybody like him.  He has a sound mind, and I instantly liked him.  I suggested a few years later that I’d like to see him be Trump’s vice president once Vivek endorsed Trump.  I thought that would be a dream team.  But Vivek is running for governor; after reading all his books, I think having him be the guy in Ohio is the best thing that could happen.  I believe that under Vivek’s leadership as governor, Ohio could become one of the world’s top economies, knocking off California.  What he’s poised to do is remarkably optimistic but not unreasonably difficult, for him.  So I get where he’s going with all this and why he’s coming to West Chester, Ohio, to make his big announcement.  Ohio can be the tech capital of the world, and with Vivek Ramaswamy as the governor and another good friend of mine, Senator George Lang, with his pro-business caucus in Columbus, the foundations for excessive greatness is a seed already planted that will grow rapidly. 

Most of all, it is by the support of President Trump that this window of opportunity most presents itself.  If Trump’s goal is to make America Great Again, Vivek’s role in all that is worthy of someone of his talents is to show that Ohio is the torch everyone else should follow.  I have been to Columbus a lot over the last several years, and at some of those momentous events, there is a pent-up energy just waiting to spring forward.  We said in those times that if only Trump were in the White House, many good things could happen.  But then there was the following question: we’d need a governor who got it and would sign things that could make great things happen that all people in Ohio would enjoy and thrive from.  And with Vivek in the governor’s chair, there isn’t anybody else in the world at this time like him.  I am very excited for Ohio to have this opportunity.  Once Vivek announces there won’t be any other candidates worth looking at, that’s not a knock against any of them personally.  This is a chance of a lifetime, and there isn’t anybody for second place.  I’m looking forward to seeing Vivek again and to hearing his official announcement.  But more than that, I am excited to see Ohio lead the country and the world in tech innovations and economic stimulation.  There is so much that only Vivek will be able to do in Ohio, and the structure is in place for him to do it behind the scenes and on the checkered floor of the Ohio Statehouse.  It just takes someone with the guts to do it, and Vivek has those guts.  And, as he said in his book Truths, he knows the truths and how to get to them in a thriving economy as a state leader and many great things to come thereafter.  These are very exciting times indeed.

If you want to see Vivek in person, just register at the link below:

https://www.vivekannouncement.com/

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707