GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is defending his decision to accept a $90,000 Soros scholarship for law school despite earning over $2 million in income the same year.
Ramaswamy accepted a $90,000 scholarship from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, founded by the brother of the progressive megadonor George Soros, in 2011, his first year enrolled at Yale Law School. Tax records Ramaswamy released in June reported $2,252,209 in total income that year, according to Fox News.
Ramaswamy has previously said he accepted the Soros scholarship because he “didn’t have the money” to attend law school at the time. Before he enrolled in law school, he worked for several years at the hedge fund QVT Financial as an investment analyst.
In response to the Fox report, Ramaswamy’s campaign continued to defend the candidate’s decision to accept the scholarship over a decade ago. Campaign spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the outlet that Ramaswamy’s choice to take the scholarship was an obvious one.
“Vivek won a generic scholarship that hundreds of students win to attend graduate school,” McLaughlin told Fox News. “It was funded by a relative of George Soros who is long dead.”
“Vivek would have been a fool to turn down that scholarship – Anyone who would have shouldn’t get anywhere near the White House doing trade deals,” she continued. She then attempted to turn the issue into an attack on Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, saying, “In fact, there’s only one candidate that will be on stage Wednesday night whom George Soros has said he wants to win this primary – and it’s not Vivek.”
The swipe at DeSantis was a reference to Soros actually saying in February that he wanted DeSantis to win the GOP primary in order to force former President Donald Trump to run as an independent and thus create an easy path for a Democrat to win the White House. Additionally, DeSantis is the only governor to remove a Soros prosecutor from office — and he’s done it twice.
Ramaswamy is expected to be one of eight Republican primary candidates participating in the first debate of the primary on Wednesday night. Ramaswamy has climbed to third in the Real Clear Politics polling average of the primary race, trailing DeSantis and Trump. Trump, the current leader, has said he is skipping the debate to sit for an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The 2024 race for the White House marks Ramaswamy’s entrance into politics after making a fortune in the biotech industry.