Don't Worry, Baby. Vivek Is Just a Nerd.

Nerds and cowboys in the age of Donald Trump's second presidency.

I wholeheartedly believe that you can categorize everyone in life on the cowboy-nerd dichotomy. The cowboy leads the cavalry into battle, but he also takes credit for the fastidious nerd. The nerd cannot survive in the wilderness without the cowboy, and the cowboy cannot win battles without the number-crunching of the nerd. The greatest organizations and empires thrive on this dichotomy. Apple — the most valuable company in the world — had two founders who perfectly fit this dichotomy: Steve Jobs (the cowboy) and Steve Wozniak (the nerd). In the simplest explanation, Wozniak built the computers, but Jobs could sell them.

Cowboys have enough liberal (small “l”) creativity to foster great ideas, but they have too much of a “free spirit” to often execute successfully. The cowboy wants to roam the Wild West. If you roam far enough, you can settle new lands. You can be the first to mine for gold in California. If you roam too far, you die from dysentery on the Oregon Trail. The nerd has a more conservative (little “c”) disposition and can do the math to make sure that you can get to California. And how exactly do you mine gold? How can you get it from San Francisco to New York City? The cowboy doesn’t know, but the nerd does.

As a humble man from Florida — personally — I probably fall closer to the category of “nerd”. I was a valedictorian who checked the boxes and was rewarded with acceptance to a top ten university, but the “Florida Man” archetype embodies one of the most extreme forms of cowboy ethos. The Florida Man does meth, wrestles alligators, and doesn’t leave his houseboat amid a Category 3 hurricane.

For decades, the nerd told us not to go to Florida. It’s too hot. It’s too humid. There are too many mosquitos, yet the Florida Man found a way. The cowboys found a way. We cleared the swamps to build concrete jungles and highways. We invented air conditioning. We invented refrigeration. Now, I stay inside during the summer with 72-degree AC blasting through my vents. Never do I have to venture into the mugginess of the Florida summer if I don’t want to do so. In the past decade or two, the nerd has told us to avoid Florida. Climate change will put Miami underwater by the year 2010, yet it did not happen. The real estate market in Florida crashed in 2008, yet people kept moving here. The nerd told us that Governor Ron DeSantis would make us all die of COVID-19, yet the cowboy still came.

Cowboys and Nerds in Political History

I see the cowboy-nerd dichotomy manifest the most in politics. The cowboy often vanquishes the nerd in elections. Jack Kennedy defeats Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan defeats Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton defeats George H.W. Bush. His son George W. Bush defeats Al Gore and John Kerry. Barack Obama defeats Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. Donald Trump defeats Hillary Clinton. The dynamic perpetuates throughout history and will continue to do so.

The cowboy and the nerd do not favor one political party over another. You can find each of them in both parties, but oftentimes the cowboy needs the nerd. George W. Bush needed Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Ronald Reagan needed George H.W. Bush. Barack Obama needed David Axelrod, and he even brought nerd Hillary Clinton into his cabinet. Nerds can find just as much success in politics, but it is a different type of success. The nerd finds success behind the scenes and can often have immense influence over the cowboy in front of him. Henry Kissinger had a massive impact on American foreign policy after World War II, yet he never won an election.

Nevertheless, nerds sometimes find political success, but — to do so — they must have the backing of a cowboy in the beginning. Dwight Eisenhower (a cowboy) begat Richard Nixon (a nerd). Nixon served as Eisenhower’s vice president from 1953 to 1961. He likely could not have elevated from senator of California to the national scene if Eisenhower had not given him his imprimatur. Nixon sought the White House on his own in 1960 after Eisenhower reached his term limit, but Nixon initially lost to Kennedy. In 1968, Nixon successfully won the White House. He won re-election in 1972 with a massive 49-state landslide, but Nixon could not have made any of these achievements without Eisenhower selecting him as his running mate in the 1952 presidential election.

Likewise, Reagan begat Bush, and Bush was able to parlay Reagan’s popularity into a term of his own after he won the 1988 presidential election. However, Bush could not thwart Cowboy Clinton of Arkansas. Interestingly, neither Nixon nor Bush could achieve a full two-term presidency. Bush outright lost re-election in 1992. As for Nixon, he did convincingly win re-election in 1972, but the swamp in Washington torpedoed him into a resignation in 1974.

Nixon’s downfall might reveal the Achilles heel of the nerds, for they have an obstinate nature. The cowboy will slap backs and compromise on his principles if he has the opportunity to achieve something greater, yet the nerd sees this action as degrading and devoid of principle. Consequently, the nerd has less success in front-facing politics. The nerd is not unaware of how to placate people in a political manner, nor is he necessarily unable. He just often refuses to do so.

Cowboys and Nerds Today in Politics

Trumpier than Trump?

How do the cowboys and nerds manifest today in politics? Since Theodore Roosevelt — a literal cowboy — took office in 1901, Trump probably embodies the cowboy archetype more than any other president has. Trump never “followed the rules” of politics as he sought and won the presidency with no prior political experience even though all the nerds said that he could not win. In 2024, he made the greatest comeback in politics even though nerds in 2020 and 2021 said that he could not win after his loss to Joe Biden and the January 6 riots, yet Trump rejected those notions.

Trump’s cowboy attitude has brought him great success in politics. He has accomplishments that very few other Republicans could achieve. He won the Rust Belt for the first time since George H.W. Bush did in 1988, and even Bush could not win Wisconsin. In November 2024, Trump won the popular vote, which a Republican had not won since George W. Bush in 2004. Trump also gained massive support with demographics with which many prior Republicans had struggled: African Americans, Latinos, working-class Americans.

Due to Trump’s unique success as a Republican, many Republican politicians across the country since Trump’s first election in 2016 have tried to mimic his style. If Trump has found success with that style and I copy it, then I will have the same success as him. Of course, this is a logical fallacy. You cannot be Trump. Nobody can, and — in the Trump age — those who have attempted this strategy in competitive races have not found the most success.

Republican politicians had the first opportunity to test this strategy at a grand scale in the 2018 midterm election, the first election after Trump’s election. I first remember this logic with Don Blankenship, a coal executive who was running in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in West Virginia. The winner of that primary election would go on to face incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin in the November general election. Blankenship branded himself as “Trumpier than Trump”, which makes no proper sense unless we abstract and intellectualize Trumpism as greater than the man himself. By definition, the Trumpiest person in the country necessarily is Donald Trump himself. In the end, Don Blankenship lost the primary election to Patrick Morrisey, who ultimately lost to Joe Manchin in the general election.

The 2018 election still did not see the attempt to be “Trumpy” at the largest scale because Trump had only served as the standard bearer of the GOP for two years. In other words, Trump had not had the opportunity to fully shape the party to his liking yet. Rather, the 2022 midterm elections saw the highest proliferation of these candidates that attempted to be “Trumpy”. In the competitive races, these Trumpy candidates lost. The GOP should have performed much better in 2022 based on historical trends for the party not in the White House, yet they lost every Senate race that they needed to win to win back the Senate. Herschel Walker lost in Georgia. Mehmet Oz lost in Pennsylvania. Blake Masters lost the Senate race in Arizona, and Kari Lake famously lost the gubernatorial race in the Grand Canyon State as well.

All these candidates, who were trying to emulate Trump, lost in embarrassing fashion while the most successful Republicans were the generic ones not necessarily trying to mimic Trump. Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio won in landslides in Florida. Governor Brian Kemp convincingly won in Georgia. Incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson won re-election in Wisconsin. Outside of Florida, the most politically successful Republican politician in the first half of Joe Biden’s presidency was probably Glenn Youngkin in Virginia.

Glenn Youngkin flipped the governor’s mansion in a state that many people had written off for the Republicans, and he did so by defeating popular former Governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin did not mimic Trump, nor did he jettison Trump. Despite his decision to not embarrassingly copy Trump as Walker or Lake did, Youngkin still won similar constituencies with which Trump has had unique success. More specifically, Youngkin performed extremely well in the rural areas in Virginia while he staved off Democratic landslide margins in the affluent, highly educated DC suburbs of Northern Virginia.

If we want to view these elections through the lens of the cowboy-nerd dichotomy, the failed Trump candidates tried to copy Trump’s cowboy attitude while the successful Biden era Republicans — such as Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis — fall closer to the nerd side of the spectrum. Moreover, seemingly only Trump can properly execute the cowboy strategy. Other Republicans who want to win in the Trump era might benefit by espousing his policies, but they must steer closer to the nerd path.

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth (from Donald Trump)

Republican politicians are seemingly learning from the party’s failures in 2022 and, now, its successes in 2024. If you had to think of the most prominent Republican politicians going into 2025, you would obviously think of Trump first as he will be entering the White House on on January 20, but who comes into our minds after Trump? Donald Trump is beginning a new presidency, but — unlike most new presidents — he will not have the ability to run for re-election due to his rare achievement of two non-consecutive terms. Only President Grover Cleveland has also won two non-consecutive terms when he won the 1892 presidential election against Benjamin Harrison, the man who defeated Cleveland four years prior.

Due to Trump’s inability to run again, we strangely begin a new presidency with the immediate thought of who will succeed Trump as the GOP nominee in the 2028 election. Based on history, we should assume that Vice President-elect JD Vance has the best chance of succeeding Trump as the GOP’s standard bearer although a Republican vice president has not succeeded his president as the nominee since Bush ran in 1988 after Reagan’s two terms. The GOP has not done so since then because George H.W. Bush lost re-election in 1992, so Vice President Dan Quayle was not going to find much success although he had a very failed presidential campaign in the 2000 Republican primaries, ultimately won by H.W.’s son George W. Bush.

In 2004, George W. Bush won a second term, which his father did not — but George W. Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney did not run for president in 2008 as Bush was leaving office because of the massive unpopularity of the Bush-Cheney administration by the end and Cheney’s poor health. Bush and Cheney had even lost a large amount of popularity with Republicans, so they likely were not going to endorse a direct continuation of the Bush presidency with a nomination of Cheney. With these factors in mind, Vance will have a strong chance at earning the 2028 nomination as long as Trump’s approval does not crater with Republicans as Bush’s approval eventually did.

Therefore, if we assume that Vance will take the Republican mantel from Trump, then we are also assuming that the GOP will choose to nominate a nerd — not a cowboy. Vance has espoused a distinctly Trumpian slate of political stances since his 2022 U.S. Senate election in Ohio. The future vice president has the populism, but he has intellectualized it in a way that a nerd would and in a way of which Trump would never conceive. Vance is following the mold of many nerd vice presidents who succeeded the cowboys presidents who selected them as running mates. I have already cited many of these men, such as Nixon after Eisenhower and Bush after Reagan.

Beyond Vance, who else is ascending in the GOP amid the 2024 resurrection of Trump? Who is driving Republican discourse? Who will be influencing policy once Trump takes office in three weeks? The failed xeroxes of Trump from 2022 are not ascending to power. Okay, technically, Walker will be serving in the Trump administration, but Trump has banished him to the ambassadorship to the Bahamas. In 1940, King George VI pulled the exact same trick when he sent his brother Edward VIII — the former British king who shamefully abdicated to his brother — to Nassau to serve as governor of the Bahamas under the Crown. We know what you are pulling, Donald!

No, instead of Vice President Herschel Walker, we are looking at an administration full of nerds — not cowboys. During Trump’s third bid for the presidency, he made an alliance very strange for a Republican presidential nominee. He allied with the nerds of Silicon Valley. He allied with the Crazy Rich Californians, an important group of people about whom I wrote in my July 12 article. Tesla CEO and richest man in the world Elon Musk had the most tangible impact with the amount of money that he spent to support Donald Trump in the 2024 election, but we can think of many more men beyond Musk, who actually joined the Trump bandwagon relatively late. Musk waited until after the assassination attempt against Trump in Pennsylvania on July 13.

Beyond Elon Musk, which other nerds have supported Trumpism and perhaps are advising the administration in some capacity? The list is long, and JD Vance himself is already adjacent to these people as he used to work for Peter Thiel before he entered politics. Here is my list, and it is not limited to these people:

1. Peter Thiel

2. David Sacks

3. Chamath Palihapitiya

4. Marc Andreessen

5. Vivek Ramaswamy

All these men supported Donald Trump before his successful defeat of Kamala Harris on November 5, but — since Trump’s election — other Silicon Valley men have capitulated to Trump and shown their support. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Sam Altman of OpenAI have all donated millions to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. These donations indicate a shifting tide of tech people, which I noted in my article “Crazy Rich Californians”. That July article of mine has aged very well since Trump’s victory.

According to Donald Trump on Truth Social, even Bill Gates is asking to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago! In that same post, Trump humbly referred to his Palm Beach compound as the “center of the universe”. After all the important and powerful people who have made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago in the past seven week, maybe Trump is making an accurate observation by calling his home the center of the universe. After all, Trump will be the most powerful person in the world on January 20. Okay, maybe we should limit the descriptor of Mar-a-Lago to “center of the world”. Come on! It’s too arrogant to say universe! We have no idea what they’re doing in the Andromeda Galaxy!

Vivek Is Just a Nerd

Vivek’s December 26 Tweet

One man on that list in the previous section has sowed a large amount of discord over the past week: Vivek Ramaswamy. The future co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside Elon Musk made a very controversial post on Twitter about H1-B visas, but — in it — Vivek Ramaswamy broached many issues way beyond H1-B visas, which many Trump supporters have been deriding as they allegedly take jobs away from Americans in favor of legal aliens. Although the programmers and engineers who benefit from H1-B visas come from many countries, India — for some reason — has received most of the ire from the most protectionist subsets of MAGA world.

On Thursday, December 26, Ramaswamy made the following Twitter post, now very infamous:

When I first saw the text of this post, I initially saw it as parody. It just was too perfect. It encapsulated everything about the nerd-cowboy dynamic in the GOP heading into the new Trump presidency. The nerds and the cowboys in the Republican Party are now disagreeing on a major issue: immigration. Ironically, when people try to attribute Trump’s 2024 victory to a singular issue, people almost always cite immigration alongside economic failures of the Biden-Harris administration, but immigration has always played an integral role in Trump’s politics going all the way back to 2015 when he first entered the arena.

Betrayal of the OG MAGA Hardliners

In the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Trump galvanized massive amounts of support in the GOP primary electorate by taking strong stances on immigration, an issue on which the GOP establishment had tried to moderate in the era of the 2012 GOP autopsy following Mitt Romney’s loss against Barack Obama. People would likely even cite immigration as a major factor for Trump’s victory against Clinton in 2016, but the issue became even more salient during the Biden presidency as Trump was launching his third bid for the White House.

Despite the political environment changing in the eight years between the 2016 election and the 2024 election, Trump’s broad rhetoric around the immigration issue has largely stayed the same. Even though the United States receives immigrants from all over the world, Trump placed the most focus on Mexico and other Central American countries to our south. Average Americans likely view the political issue of immigration as synonymous with Mexico at this point, and Mexico serves a broad metonym for all the countries south of the American border. They all speak Spanish anyway, right?

Democrats often minimize the opposition to massive immigration to the United States as purely xenophobic and racist. Perhaps some people — maybe a significant number — come at this issue from a bigoted place, but the issue of immigration has a large economic dimension. Sure, illegal immigrants drain public services, but — through the prism of economic protectionism — illegal immigrants pose the most threat because they drive down wages for non-skilled labor, thereby hurting working class American citizens. Just as average Americans just associated immigration exclusively with Mexico or wherever else speaks Spanish, they also associate the “jobs” the immigrants are taking as low-skill manual jobs. Average Americans never consider that immigrants might be taking jobs in highly educated sectors. These illegals can’t even speak English! How are they going to work at Google?

How does Ramaswamy’s post relate to the economic dimension of immigration? Well, we are no longer discussing illegal immigration, largely coming from south of the border. Rather, we are discussing legal immigration via our H1-B visa system. When OG MAGA supporters saw that Musk and Ramaswamy were touting the excellence of the H1-B visa program, they revolted against the nerds who recently allied with Trump in 2024, but — to care about H1-B visas or to even know what they are — you have to be flirting with the “intellectualized” version of the MAGA agenda, heralded by people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. These characters have been riding the MAGA train since 2016 while Ramaswamy and Musk are just Johnny-come-latelies!

In simple terms, the OG MAGA immigration hard-liners do not support our current liberal H1-B visa program. They think that the program leads to college-educated people from other countries — oftentimes, India and China — stealing jobs that would otherwise go to current American citizens. In a way, this issue seems different from the old-fashioned and simplistic conception of an illegal alien from Mexico stealing a construction job from an American citizen, but the economics are the same. A sudden, large increase in the supply of labor drives down the equilibrium price for labor. It doesn’t matter if the immigrant is a software engineer at Google in Silicon Valley or a lettuce picker in the Central Valley in California. They can have the exact same effect on the labor market in the United States.

The Psychology of Vivek

As I have already written, the text of Ramaswamy’s post goes way beyond the actual intricacies of immigration policy. Ramaswamy lambasted American “culture” as the reason why tech companies are hiring workers with visas over American citizens. Ramaswamy hits several archetypes similar to the cowboy-nerd dichotomy. He criticizes American culture, which he alleges “celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad, or the jock over the valedictorian”. According to Ramaswamy, a culture that does so “will not produce the best engineers”.

Ramaswamy ventures into specific pop culture references: Cory from Boy Meets World, Slater from Saved by the Bell, and Stefan from Family Matters. He wants more Screeches and Steve Urkels, but Kanye West would disagree. As West raps in “Dark Fantasy” from the 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: “too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low”.

We want more verbally abusive teachers like JK Simmons’s character in Whiplash and fewer reruns of Friends. Actually, it’s not just the show Friends. American adolescents should want fewer friends! Social activity is just distracting you from studying for the Math Olympiad or the Spelling Bee! I can’t help to think of another character from the Kanye West Cinematic Universe: the middle-aged man from the “School Spirit” skits in West’s 2004 debut album The College Dropout.

You know what college does for you? It makes you really smart, man. All you kids wanted to talk in the back of the class. Not me, I listened. Okay? I was a hall monitor. This was meant to be. You know how many classes I took?. Extra classes, extra classes. No, I've never had sex. But you know what? My degree keeps me satisfied

You look at my degrees, and you look at my life. Yeah, I'm fifty-two, so what? Hate all you want, but I'm smart, I'm so smart. And, and I'm in school. All these guys out here, uh, making money all these ways. And I'm spending mine to be smart. You know why? 'Cause when I die, buddy. You know what's gonna keep me warm? That's right, those degrees.

Ramaswamy claims that, in this new Trump presidency, we can recreate a Sputnik moment. American students can get back in STEM! If you just stop going to the mall, maybe you — from Peoria, Illinois — can make it to Google and Microsoft just like the Indian nationals with the H1-B visas!

The MAGA civil war over H1-B visas is not about immigration. Okay, maybe it is a little bit, but it goes beyond immigration. The schism reveals a deeper psychic rift. The OG MAGA hardliners do not want the nerds to take over a clearly cowboy movement. In 2016, part of the Trump revolution was to dethrone the old nerds from the previous GOP establishment. Jeb Bush lost. Marco Rubio lost. Ted Cruz lost.

Donald Trump won, yet the nerds have morphed into a new creature. Instead of Federalist Society members from Yale and Harvard Law, we are getting alumni from Silicon Valley. It is a new breed of right-wing nerd in the new Trump administration. Sure, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka might still have slots in the administration, but the new nerds now have a seat at the table too. Besides, Musk is way more powerful and influential than either Miller or Gorka ever will be.

Bannon might have made the most salient retort against Ramaswamy on his War Room podcast two days ago.

You’re going to repeat high school here, nerds. You’re not going to date the prom queen. If you keep pushing this, you’re going to repeat high school. You’re going to get stuffed in the locker.

We’re putting the nerds back in the locker. Trump is our guy. Keep pushing this, and it’s back to high school for you—stuffed in the locker.

We haven’t gotten here to give it [the MAGA movement] over to a bunch of geeks … who you would stuff in a locker.

Where Is Donald Trump?

Strangely, Trump stayed out of the conflict for about 48 hours before he backed the Ramaswamy side of the debate, but it makes sense. Trump is really a lame duck. He just wants to have fun. I predict that we will see Trump playing a lot of golf in Florida and New Jersey during his second presidency, creating a power vacuum. The nerds and the cowboys will fight to fill that void. In 2026, it will be to fill the void of media attention, but — in 2027 — it will be to take up the mantel of the Republican Party in the strange post-Trump world.

Based on Trump’s seemingly apathetic and tepid statements and actions so far as president-elect, I think the nerds might win this battle — especially, if the GOP nominates Vance in 2028. Vance will much more likely follow the views of Ramaswamy, Musk, and Thiel than Bannon, Gorka, and Miller. Regardless, it all goes back to geeks and jocks. It all goes back to the prom queen. Most importantly, it all goes back to cowboys and nerds.