File photo of Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump.
| Photo Credit: AP

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump, will not be a delegate representing Florida at the Republican National Convention in July due to prior commitments, the office of his mother Melania said on May 10.

On May 9, a campaign official said Barron Trump, 18, had been selected by the state party as a delegate from Florida, a notable move given that he has kept largely out of the public eye during the campaign.

“While Barron is honoured to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican Party, he regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments,” Melania Trump’s office said in a statement.

In Florida, presidential campaigns submit a list of proposed delegates to the state party, which in this case would have included Mr. Barron Trump.

Delegates are allocated following primary contests in each state. While the rules are complex, delegates are typically assigned to represent a candidate at the convention, where the nominee is officially selected.

Mr. Donald Trump is set to face President Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.

Washington:

Former president Donald Trump has sharpened his allegation that his Democratic successor has weaponized the US justice system against him, comparing Joe Biden’s tactics to those of Hitler’s Gestapo, American media reported Sunday.

The Republican 2024 presidential candidate made the remark during a private meeting Saturday with top party leaders and wealthy donors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to a recording provided to US media by one donor.

In a 90-minute speech, Trump accused the Democrats of “running a Gestapo administration,” referring to the secret police force in Nazi Germany. “It’s the only way they’re going to win,” he said. 

The “Gestapo” comment came as the campaign has begun heating up, and it follows several other Trump remarks that critics have said are dangerously inflammatory, including calling political rivals “vermin” and comparing immigrants to “animals.”

His comments in Mar-a-Lago brought loud applause from the audience, which included a number of potential vice presidential picks, according to Politico.

He again lashed into the prosecutors who have brought four separate court cases against him, including the hush-money trial now taking place in New York. 

Trump denounced what he claimed was a “witch hunt” hatched by the Democratic administration to eliminate his key presidential rival.

The Biden campaign, which has denied any role in the legal cases, responded Sunday, saying the Republican’s angry remarks confirmed “what we already knew: Trump’s campaign is about him. His fury, his revenge, his lies, and his retribution.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

With just over six months left for the American general elections, some South Asian election activists are mobilizing to re-elect U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to the White House. The all-volunteer group, South Asians for Mr. Biden, kicked off its activities for the election season with a virtual event held on April 25 that featured messages from lawmakers and functionaries of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and focused on issues such as reproductive rights and gun control.

The group, like other groups working in this space, is motivated by the idea that South Asian populations in battleground States had exceeded the margins of victory for Democrats in previous election cycles (2020 and 2021 for example). This makes South Asians, like other Asian American and Pacific Islander groups (AAPI or  AANHNPI to include Native Hawaiians ), a potential deciding factor in who wins in battleground states.

 In a close election, such as the 2020 race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden,  winning swing states could be key to winning the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. However, Democrats and Republicans are focused not just on the Biden v Trump rematch this year but also other ‘down ballot’ races –  crucial Senate and House seats as well as contests for  state offices.  

South Asians for Biden had reached out to  a few hundred thousand South Asian and AAPI voters directly and via its digital and video campaigns in 2020 and 2021, according to Neha Dewan, National Co-Director of the group. Ms Dewan listed the group’s outreach in States such as Georgia and Wisconsin where Mr Biden won by wafer-thin margins ( around 12,000 votes in Georgia for example).

During the virtual event, titled, ‘Mobilizing the South Asian Community to be the Margin of Victory’, Ms Dewan highlighted the work of the Biden administration in areas she said were of importance to the community : reproductive rights (e.g., women’s access to contraception and abortion), curbing gun violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans.

“I know that the calls that were made into Georgia and into Wisconsin, were beyond the winning margin,” said Principal Deputy Campaign Manager for Biden-Harris 2024, Quentin Fulks, in a recorded video message.

The AAPI vote was 4% of the electorate in Georgia, and an important part of the margin (just under 3%) that got Senator Raphael Warnock re-elected the Senate (December 2022), Mr Fulks said. Democrats retained control (51-49) of the U.S. Senate with Mr Warnock – who initially came to the chamber after winning a partial term in 2020 – getting elected for full term in the 118th Congress that began in 2023.

“It’s going to take all of us again in 2024 to make sure that we hit 270 electoral votes,” Mr Fulks said.

The majority of U.S. born and foreign-born Indian Americans lean towards the Democratic Party (as per 2020 data), a statistic the group appears to capitalise on. One of the speakers at the virtual event, Washington (State)  Democrat, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal cited data to support the view that South Asian social and political priorities were aligned with those of the Biden-Harris platform.

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Ro Khanna, an Indian American California Democrat emphasized that South Asian voters were critical  to electoral victories  in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Mr Biden won the electoral college votes in each of these States in 2020.

“We were key to President Biden and Vice President Harris’s 2020 historic win. We need to mobilize again,” he said.

Mr Khanna, whose constituency includes a part of Silicon Valley,  highlighted his involvement with the CHIPS and Science Act, one of the Biden administration’s big ticket policies aimed at increasing semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. (Mr Khanna was one of the lawmakers who introduced one of the  two pieces of legislation that later went on to become the Act).

“There are so many South Asians involved in creating good jobs and Arizona, in upstate New York, in Ohio, as a result of that act,” he said.

Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) AAPI Caucus Bel Leong Hong described the 2024 elections in existential terms.

“We are fighting for a place for us to be in, we are fighting to be who we are,” she said.

Democrats rallying around abortion rights and gun control

Issues important to South Asian Americans – especially reproductive rights, voting rights and gun violence – featured repeatedly through the event. This mirrors the overall approach of Democrats – starting at the top with Mr Biden and Ms Harris – to rally voters, especially women, will who would otherwise have not voted or voted for Mr Trump, to vote for Mr Biden.

Anita Somani, a physician who is a representative in the Ohio State Assembly had a message about voting officials in who would  protect reproductive rights.

Abortion and — more broadly — reproductive rights, have been a key electoral issue, especially since June 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a judgement that broadly protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. With reproductive rights becoming a state issue since the judgement was overturned, a number of States have enacted measures to protect these rights, with Ohio residents voting in November 2023 to do the same.  

“Imagine that kids are now the experts on how to dodge bullets while sitting at their desks are walking to the corner store,” said Shikha Hamilton,  the parent of bi-cultural Indian and Black daughter , who has worked for over two decades on gun violence prevention.

Anita Somani, a physician who is a representative in the Ohio State Assembly had a message about voting officials in who would  protect reproductive rights.

Editorial | Square one: On the 2024 U.S. Presidential election as a Biden-Trump rematch

Ballot access is an issue

Battle lines this year are also drawn around voting rights with a number of Republican governed states passing tightening access to the ballot. Last year (data as of October) at least 14 States had passed laws making it harder to vote while 23 had made it easier to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

At the South Asians for Biden re-launch, Gen Z candidate for Georgia State Senate, Aswhin Ramaswami, a former election security official, discussed the growing legislative challenges to voting in Georgia. The 24 year old is  running against State Senator Shawn Still, who was indicted, along with Mr Trump and others, for illegally trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Americans will elect the next President of the United Sates, as well as a number of U.S. Senators and Congressmen, State governors and local officials on November 5 this year.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Nicole Shanahan react on stage as she becomes the vice presidential candidate of Kennedy, in Oakland, California.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Robert F.Kennedy Jr. has picked Nicole Shanahan, a California lawyer and philanthropist who’s never held elected office, to be his running mate in his independent bid for president, he announced on Tuesday.

An unconventional choice, Shanahan, who is 38, brings youth and considerable wealth to Kennedy’s long-shot campaign but is little known outside Silicon Valley.

Shanahan leads Bia-Echo Foundation, an organisation she founded to direct money toward issues, including women’s reproductive science, criminal justice reform and environmental causes. She also is a Stanford University fellow and was the founder and chief executive of ClearAccessIP, a patent management firm that was sold in 2020.

Shanahan was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 2018 to 2023, and they have a young daughter. She was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Kennedy made his announcement.

Before the announcement, Kennedy’s campaign manager and daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, praised Shanahan’s work on behalf of “honest governance, racial equity, regenerative agriculture and children’s and maternal health”. She said the work “reflects many of our country’s most urgent needs”.

Kennedy, who said in an interview Monday with “The State of California” on KCBS radio that his VP search placed a priority on “somebody who could represent young people”, said Tuesday that Shanahan — who he said, like him, has “left the Democratic Party” — also shares his concerns about government overreach and his distrust in major political parties’ abilities to make lasting change.

“She’ll tell you that she now understands at the defence agencies work for the military industrial complex, that health agencies work for big pharma and the USDA works for big ag and the processed food cartels,” Kennedy said at his Oakland rally. “The EPA is in cahoots with the polluters, that the scientists can be mercenaries, that government officials sometimes act as sensors, and that the Fed works for Wall Street and allows millionaire bankers to prey upon on Main Street and the American worker.” Kennedy had previously signalled interest in picking a celebrity or a household name such as NFL quarterback Aaron Rogers, “Dirty Jobs” star Mike Rowe or former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, who was a wrestler and actor.

According to campaign finance records, Shanahan has long donated to Democratic candidates, including giving the maximum amount allowed to Kennedy when he was still pursuing that party’s nomination before switching to an independent bid in October.

It was unclear if Shanahan would use her own money on the campaign, but she has already opened her wallet to back Kennedy.

She was a driving force and the primary donor behind a Super Bowl ad produced by a pro-Kennedy super PAC, American Values 2024, for which she contributed USD 4 million. In response to criticism following the ad’s release, the super PAC said its “idea, funding, and execution came primarily” from Shanahan.

The super PAC can accept unlimited funds but is legally barred from coordinating with Kennedy’s team.

But as a candidate for vice-president, Shanahan can give unlimited sums to the campaign directly. That’s potentially a huge boost for Kennedy’s expensive push to get on the ballot in all 50 states, an endeavour he has said will cost USD 15 million and require collecting more than a million signatures.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump warned of dire consequences for the country if the other wins another term in the White House as the pair held duelling rallies in Georgia on March 9 fresh off strong wins in Super Tuesday contests that positioned them for an all-but-certain rematch this November.

The state was a pivotal 2020 battleground — so close four years ago that Mr. Trump finds himself indicted here for his push to “find 11,780 votes” and overturn Mr. Biden’s victory — and both parties are preparing for another closely contested race in the state this year.

Mr. Biden opened his speech at a rally in Atlanta noting that Mr. Trump was across the state with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand lawmaker who has gone from the fringes of her party to the fore. “It can tell you a lot about a person who he keeps company with,” Mr. Biden said to applause. Mr. Biden noted that Mr. Trump had hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — who has rolled back democracy in his country — at his Florida club the day before.

“When he says he wants to be a dictator, I believe him,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Trump. “Our freedoms are literally on the ballot this November.”

Mr. Biden hosted the rally at Pullman Yards, a 27-acre arts and entertainment venue in Atlanta that was formerly an industrial site to receive the endorsement of Collective PAC, Latino Victory Fund and AAPI Victory Fund, a trio of political groups representing, respectively, Black, Latino, and Asian Americans and Pacific Island voters. The groups were announcing a $30 million commitment to mobilise voters on Mr. Biden’s behalf.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, hammered Mr. Biden on the border and blamed him for the death of 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley last month. An immigrant from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally has been arrested and charged with her murder. He hosted Riley’s family at his rally in Rome, Greene’s hometown.

“What Joe Biden has done on our border is a crime against humanity and the people of this nation for which he will never be forgiven,” Mr. Trump said, promising the largest deportation in history. “What a tremendous shame,” he said.

Ahead of his rally, Mr. Biden expressed regret for using the term “illegal” to during his State of the Union address to describe Riley’s suspected killer, drawing more criticism from Mr. Trump’s team.

Mr. Trump, who took the stage at the same moment Mr. Biden was still speaking at another part of the state, skewered the president for the apology and said, “Are we going crazy?”

“I say he was an illegal alien. He was an illegal immigrant. He was an illegal migrant. And he shouldn’t have been in our country and he never would have been under the Trump policy,” he said to loud cheers.

Mr. Trump also highlighted the very things Mr. Biden knocked him for, saying that he “had dinner last night with a great gentleman from Hungary, Viktor Orbán” and praised Greene for yelling at Mr. Biden during his State of the Union about Riley, calling her “very brave.”

Also Read | Hungary’s PM Orban supports Trump after Florida meeting

Mr. Trump’s rally opened with a message asking attendees to rise to support the hundreds of people serving jail time for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, when thousands of pro-Trump supporters tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by halting the counting of Electoral College votes.

The intensity of the rhetoric presaged a grueling eight months of campaigning ahead in the state.

“We’re a true battleground state now,” said U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, an Atlanta Democrat who doubles as state party chairwoman.

Mr. Trump, while repeating his lies about the 2020 election on Saturday, declared, “With your vote, we are going to win the state of Georgia in an epic landslide.”

Once a Republican stronghold, Georgia is now so competitive that neither party can agree on how to describe today’s divide. A “52-48 state,” said Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whose party controls state government. “We’re not blue, we’re not red,” Ms. Williams countered, but “periwinkle,” a claim she supports with Mr. Biden’s 2020 win and the two Democratic senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, Georgia sent to Washington.

There is agreement, at least, that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump each have a path to victory — and plenty of obstacles along the way.

“Mr. Biden’s numbers are in the tank for a lot of good reasons, and we can certainly talk about that. And so, it makes it where Mr. Trump absolutely can win the race,” Gov. Kemp said at a recent forum sponsored by Punchbowl News. “I also think he could lose the race. I think it’s going to be a lot tougher than people realize.”

Mr. Biden’s margin was about a quarter of a percentage point in 2020. Warnock won his 2022 Senate runoff by 3 points. Gov. Kemp was elected in 2018 by 1.5 percentage points but expanded his 2022 reelection margin to 7.5 points, a blowout in a battleground state.

In each of those elections, Democrats held wide advantages in the core of metro Atlanta, where Mr. Biden will be Saturday. Democrats also performed well in Columbus and Savannah and a handful of rural, majority-Black counties. But Republicans dominated in other rural areas, small towns and the smallest cities — like Rome.

At Trump’s rally, at a city in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, more than 3,000 people packed inside an event center Saturday to hear the former president speak. His campaign handed out signs featuring the image of Laken Riley.

Candace Duvall, from Hampton, Georgia, wearing a white “Trump 2024,” T-shirt, a gold purse that said “Trump” and a pair of earrings that said “Never surrender” on one earring and Mr. Trump’s mugshot on the other, declared that her candidate is “going to save this country.”

She faulted Mr. Biden for fumbling the pronunciation of Riley’s name during his State of the Union speech Thursday.

“That happened right here in Georgia. That hits home for us. We know why that happened. We know why,” she said, adding that there were too many migrants coming into the country.

Ms. Duvall said she thinks Mr. Trump is winning over voters who didn’t like him before “because they see the difference now” with Mr. Biden.

“If somebody gives you sirloin and then they take it away and give you a hamburger, you’re going to want sirloin again,” she said.

But the same State of the Union address being criticized by Republicans has also been a source of momentum for Mr. Biden, who openly challenged Mr. Trump’s commitment to democracy, U.S. allies, the middle class and the reproductive rights of women.

Supporters saw his spirited performance as cooling worries about the 81-year-old’s age. Mr. Biden laid into the 77-year-old Mr. Trump for having the “oldest of ideas” as the former president has promised that a return to the White House would bring retribution to his opponents.

This combo image shows President Joe Biden, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump,. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Presidential candidates crisscrossed the country in the run up to Super Tuesday (March 5) this year, when 17 U.S. States and territories hold their primaries and caucuses to pick their contenders for November’s general election. The support of more than a third of each party’s delegates (i.e., representatives who vote in the parties’ conventions to select the candidate) is up for grabs on Tuesday.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sweep the Republican contests on Tuesday, with Nikki Haley, the former American Ambassador to the U.N., having won just one race thus far (Washington DC). Although, at this stage, a Biden-Trump showdown is all but certain, further campaigning has been planned for the following weeks, with groups of states voting in March and April. Mr Trump, who has just under 100 cases against him, received a boost on Monday as the U.S. Supreme Court said it was wrong for the State of Colorado to have taken him off its ballot for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

 The incumbent, U.S. President Joe Biden, is running uncontested for the Democratic (re)nomination in many of the states, while some states will have other contestants on them, such as self-help author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips.

Mr Biden is therefore expected to win the day on Tuesday but the process has revealed that the ultimate path to the White House – when the primaries are completed and Mr Biden presumably faces Mr Trump – will be far more challenging for Mr Biden, than is often the case for a sitting President seeking a second term. Questions about Mr Biden’s age, perceptions about the economy and inflation and Mr Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict have been working against him.

Mr Biden was faced with bleak polling results over the weekend. A New York Times/ Sienna College poll indicated that the President had the support of 43% of registered voters versus Mr Trump’s 48%. Some 10% of those who voted for Mr Biden in 2020 were planning to vote for Mr Trump in 2024. Democratic primary voters were more or less equally split on whether Mr Biden should be their party’s candidate, as per the poll, with the strongest opposition to the idea from those under 45 years of age. The data also indicated that Mr Biden’s edge over Mr Trump among non-white non-college graduates had also significantly narrowed since 2020.

After Democratic politicians urged primary voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan to show their frustration with Mr Biden’s policy towards Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Gaza, which have claimed more than 30,000 lives, more than 100,000 Michiganders cast an ‘ uncommitted’ ballot in last week’s Democratic primary.

This was more than the target of 10,000 uncommitted votes and was some five times the number of such votes in the last two presidential elections and is being seen as a warning to Mr Biden to change his accommodative stance towards Israel. A growing number of voters, not just Muslim Americans but also younger voters across the board , could sit at home on election day if the administration continues with the status quo. A few thousand voters could make a huge difference: Mr Trump beat former Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton in Michigan by less than 11,000 votes in 2016 and Mr Biden won the state from Mr Trump in 2020 by a margin of 2.8% (just over 154,000 votes).

On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate ceasefire in the region and a return of hostages taken by Hamas. On Monday, she was scheduled to meet with Israeli War Cabinet Member Benny Gantz.

Trump set to win big on Tuesday

Mr Trump has so far won 247 delegates – more than 10 times Ms Haley’s tally. So far his legal troubles have not prevented Mr Trump from moving forward and he has used them in his campaign rallies to portray himself as the victim of a political witch-hunt.

Ms Haley, who served on the Trump cabinet, has said she will remain in the race as long as she is “ competitive” but declined to define this term. She has shown some traction among college graduates and independent voters as well those who consider themselves’ moderate.

While she has claimed she is not anti-Trump, Ms Haley’s attacks on her former boss have become sharper in the run up to Super Tuesday. She has suggested that both lead candidates are too old for the job, has pointed to the fiscal deficit and spending – particularly during Mr Trump’s time in the White House and criticized his ‘ isolationist ‘ foreign policy and admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Significantly, Ms Haley did not commit to supporting Mr Trump if he is the chosen GOP candidate, when questioned about a pledge all GOP candidates had to take before an intra-party debate that they would support the eventual nominee. She cited changes in the party organisation, specifically Mr Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s bid for the position of Co-Chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC).

“The RNC is now not the same RNC , now it’s Trump’s daughter in law, “ she told NBC’s ‘ Meet the Press’ on Sunday. She also said she did not know if Mr Trump would abide by the country’s constitution if elected.

Other important contests to be held on Tuesday

There are also a number of ‘ down ballot ‘ primaries on Super Tuesday- such as a primary contest for the post of governor (North Carolina), several for the U.S. House of Representatives , where the Republicans have a four seat majority, and the U.S. Senate., including a primary contest in California for the late Senator Diane Feinstein’s Senate seat.

Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence announces that is withdrawing from the presidential campaign during the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 28, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence ended his cash-strapped presidential campaign on October 28, after struggling for months to convince Republican voters he was the best alternative to the man he once served with unswerving loyalty — Donald Trump.

“To the American people I say: This is not my time,” Mr. Pence told attendees at the Republican Jewish Coalition donor conference in Las Vegas.

Mr. Pence, 64, publicly broke with Mr. Trump, lambasting the former president for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Pence gambled that Republican primary voters would reward him for following the U.S. Constitution rather than obeying Mr. Trump, who wanted him to overturn the 2020 election results.

But Mr. Trump’s base of core supporters never forgave Mr. Pence for overseeing the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election. They viewed Mr. Pence’s actions in his ceremonial role as president of the U.S. Senate as a supreme act of disloyalty to Mr. Trump, who has become the runaway frontrunner in the Republican race.

Mr. Trump has built one of the biggest primary opinion poll leads in U.S. electoral history. Polls show a majority of Republican voters have embraced, or do not care about, Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and his subsequent efforts to overturn the result.

Mr. Pence stopped short of endorsing anyone in his speech on October 28, but in an apparent swipe at Mr. Trump, called on Americans to select someone who appeals to “the better angels of our nature” and can lead with “civility”.

Mr. Pence failed to attract enough anti-Trump Republican primary voters, and donors, to sustain a candidacy that has languished in the low single digits in opinion polls and struggled to raise money since he announced his White House bid in June.

As a result Mr. Pence, a stolid campaigner short on charisma, was low on cash by October and despite spending time and resources in the first Republican nominating state of Iowa, had failed to catch fire there.

When his campaign released Mr. Pence’s third quarter fundraising totals on October 15, his candidacy was $620,000 in debt and only had $1.2 million cash on hand, far less than several better-performing Republican rivals and insufficient to sustain the financial demands of a White House race.

In several past elections, former vice-presidents who have competed to become the White House nominee have succeeded, including Republican George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Democrat Al Gore in 2000.

This year, Mr. Pence was up against the political juggernaut that is Mr. Trump, along with other rivals who appealed more to anti-Trump primary voters and donors, including former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Mr. Pence ran as a traditional social and fiscal conservative, and a foreign policy hawk, calling for increased military aid to Ukraine and cuts in welfare entitlement spending. But that brand of Republicanism has been eclipsed in the Trump-era by full-throated populism and “America First” isolationism.

Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Polk County Summer Sizzle fundraising event in Clive, Iowa on August 25, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AP

Vivek Ramaswamy, an Indian-American Republican presidential candidate, has indicated that he would like Elon Musk to be an adviser in his administration if he gets elected as the US president in 2024.

Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, made these remarks on Friday at a town hall in Iowa when he was asked about whom he would want as advisers for his potential presidency, NBC News reported.

Mr. Ramaswamy admires the mass layoffs Musk conducted after taking over Twitter last year.

The billionaire biotech entrepreneur said in response that he wanted people with a “blank fresh impression” who do not “come from within” the government.

“I’ve enjoyed getting to know better, Elon Musk recently, I expect him to be an interesting adviser of mine because he laid off 75% of the employees at Twitter,” Mr. Ramaswamy was quoted as saying in the report.

“And then the effectiveness actually went up,” he noted.

A second-generation Indian-American, Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences in 2014 and led the largest biotech IPOs of 2015 and 2016, eventually culminating in successful clinical trials in multiple disease areas that led to FDA-approved products, according to his bio.

Mr. Musk, 52, is the billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Mr. Ramaswamy has previously complimented Musk’s management of the social media company, now called X, saying he would run the government the way that Musk runs the company.

“What he did at Twitter is a good example of what I want to do to the administrative state,” Mr.Ramaswamy said in an interview on Fox News last week.

“Take out the 75 per cent of the dead weight cost, improve the actual experience of what it’s supposed to do.”

“He put an X through Twitter, I’ll put a big X through the administrative state,” he added. “So, that’s where I’m at on common tactics with Elon.”

The workforce of X has been cut down from just under 8,000 to about 1,500 since Musk bought Twitter for USD 44 billion last fall.

The billionaire — who previously pledged his support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ White House bid and co-hosted DeSantis’ chaotic campaign launch on Twitter Spaces — said last week that he found Ramaswamy to be a “very promising candidate.”

Mr. Ramaswamy is the youngest Republican presidential candidate ever. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina is another Indian-American Republican Party candidate vying for the party’s nomination.

Mr. Ramaswamy has been vocal about his desire to shut down the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the NBC report added.

He is one of the wealthiest Americans under the age of 40. He studied biology at Harvard before obtaining a law degree from Yale and was briefly a billionaire before a downturn in the stock market shrunk his wealth to just over USD 950 million, according to Forbes.