In his breakout efficiency within the Republican major race, Vivek Ramaswamy has harnessed his populist bravado whereas steadily and unapologetically contorting the reality for political acquire, a lot in the identical means that former President Donald J. Trump has mastered.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s sample of falsehoods has been the topic of intensifying scrutiny by the news media and, extra just lately, his G.O.P. opponents, who clashed with him typically throughout the celebration’s first debate final Wednesday.

There are layers to Mr. Ramaswamy’s distortions: He has spread lies and exaggerations on topics together with the 2020 election outcomes, the Jan. 6 assaults on the Capitol and local weather change. When challenged on these statements, Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who’s the first millennial Republican to run for president, has in a number of situations claimed that he had by no means made them or that he had been taken out of context.

But his denials have repeatedly been refuted by recordings and transcripts from Mr. Ramaswamy’s interviews — or, in some instances, excerpts from his personal ebook.

Here are some notable events when he sought to retreat from his previous statements or mischaracterized primary info:

A deceptive anecdote

At a breakfast spherical desk occasion organized by his marketing campaign on Friday in Indianola, Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy recounted how he had visited the South Side of Chicago in May to advertise his immigration proposals to a largely Black viewers.

He boasted that nowhere had his concepts on the problem been extra enthusiastically obtained than within the nation’s third most populous metropolis, the place his look had adopted neighborhood protests over the housing of migrants in a neighborhood highschool.

“I have never been in a room more in favor of my proposal to use the U.S. military to secure the southern border and seal the Swiss cheese down there than when I was in a nearly all-Black room of supposedly mostly Democrats on the South Side of Chicago,” he stated.

But Mr. Ramaswamy’s retelling of the anecdote was sharply contradicted by the observations of a New York Times reporter who coated each occasions.

The reporter witnessed the viewers in Chicago pepper Mr. Ramaswamy about reparations, systemic racism and his opposition to affirmative motion. Immigration was barely talked about throughout the formal program. It was so absent {that a} Ramaswamy marketing campaign aide at one level pleaded for questions on the problem. With that prompting, a single Republican marketing consultant stood as much as query Mr. Ramaswamy on his proposals.

In one of many extra heated exchanges of last week’s G.O.P. debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey criticized Mr. Ramaswamy for lionizing Mr. Trump and defending his actions throughout the Jan. 6 assault.

He sought to forged Mr. Ramaswamy as an opportunist who was attempting to pander to Mr. Trump’s supporters by attributing the riot to authorities censorship throughout the 2020 election.

“In your book, you had much different things to say about Donald Trump than you’re saying here tonight,” Mr. Christie stated.

Mr. Ramaswamy bristled and stated, “That’s not true.”

But in his 2022 ebook “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” Mr. Ramaswamy had harsh phrases for Mr. Trump and gave a extra somber evaluation of the violence.

“It was a dark day for democracy,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote. “The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”

When requested by The Times in regards to the excerpt, Mr. Ramaswamy insisted that his rhetoric had not developed and identified that he had co-written an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal 5 days after the Jan. 6 assault that was important of the actions of social media corporations throughout the 2020 election.

“Also what I said at the time was that I really thought what Trump did was regrettable,” he stated. “I would have handled it very differently if I was in his shoes. I will remind you that I am running for U.S. president in the same race that Donald Trump is running right now.”

Mr. Ramaswamy parsed his criticism of the previous president, nevertheless.

“But a bad judgment is not the same thing as a crime,” he stated.

During the talk, Mr. Ramaswamy additionally sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence, whose senior aide and onetime chief of employees Marc Short told NBC News the subsequent day that Mr. Ramaswamy was not a real populist.

“There’s populism and then there’s just simply fraud,” he stated.

By blunting his message in regards to the former president’s accountability and casting himself as an outsider, Mr. Ramaswamy seems to be making a play for Mr. Trump’s base — and the G.O.P. front-runner has taken discover.

In a conversation on Tuesday with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Mr. Trump stated that he was open to choosing Mr. Ramaswamy as his working mate, however he had some recommendation for him.

“He’s starting to get out there a little bit,” Mr. Trump stated. “He’s getting a little bit controversial. I got to tell him: ‘Be a little bit careful. Some things you have to hold in just a little bit, right?’”

Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11

Since coming into the race, Mr. Ramaswamy has repeatedly floated conspiracy theories a couple of cover-up by the federal authorities in reference to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults, a story seemingly tailor-made to members of the G.O.P.’s proper wing who’re deeply distrustful of establishments.

In a current profile by The Atlantic, he informed the journal, “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the twin towers.”

While he acknowledged that he had “no reason” to consider that the quantity was “anything other than zero,” Mr. Ramaswamy instructed that the federal government had not been clear in regards to the assaults.

“But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to,” he stated.

Yet when Mr. Ramaswamy was asked to clarify those remarks by Kaitlan Collins of CNN two nights earlier than final week’s debate, he backtracked and accused The Atlantic of misquoting him.

“I’m telling you the quote is wrong, actually,” he stated.

Soon after Mr. Ramaswamy claimed that his phrases had been twisted, The Atlantic released a recording and transcript from the interview that confirmed that he had certainly been quoted precisely.

When requested in an interview on Saturday whether or not the audio had undercut his argument, Mr. Ramaswamy reiterated his rivalry that the news media had typically misrepresented him.

“I think there’s a reason why,” he stated, suggesting that his free-flowing means of talking broke the mildew of so-called scripted candidates. “I just don’t speak like a traditional politician, and I think the system is not used to that. The political media is not used to that. And that lends itself naturally then to being inaccurately portrayed, to being distorted.”

Mr. Trump’s allies have used comparable justifications when discussing the previous president’s falsehoods, citing his stream-of-consciousness talking model. His allies and supporters have admired his impulse to refuse to apologize or again down when known as out, an method Mr. Ramaswamy has echoed.

Mr. Ramaswamy stated that he was requested about Sept. 11 whereas discussing the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and his repeated requires an accounting of what number of federal brokers have been within the subject that day. His marketing campaign described The Atlantic’s recording as a “snippet.”

At the beginning of The Times’s dialog with Mr. Ramaswamy, he stated that he assumed that the interview was being recorded and famous that his marketing campaign was recording, too.

“We’re now doing mutually on the record, so just F.Y.I.,” he stated.

Pardoning Hunter Biden

No news outlet has been off-limits to Mr. Ramaswamy’s claims of being misquoted: This month, he denounced a New York Post headline that learn: “GOP 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ‘open’ to pardon of Hunter Biden.”

The Aug. 12 article cited an interview that The Post had performed with him.

“After we have shut down the F.B.I., after we have refurbished the Department of Justice, after we have systemically pardoned anyone who was a victim of a political motivated persecution — from Donald Trump and peaceful January 6 protests — then would I would be open to evaluating pardons for members of the Biden family in the interest of moving the nation forward,” Mr. Ramaswamy was quoted as saying.

The subsequent morning on Fox News Channel, which, like The Post, is owned by News Corp, Mr. Ramaswamy told the anchor Maria Bartiromo that the report was erroneous.

“Maria, that was misquoted and purposeful opposition research with the headline,” he stated. “You know how this game is played.”

The Post didn’t reply to a request for remark.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Ramaswamy described the headline as “manufactured” and stated it was a part of “the ridiculous farce of this gotcha game.”

Aid to Israel

Mr. Ramaswamy clashed with Fox News host Sean Hannity Monday night time when confronted with feedback he has made about support to Israel. Mr. Ramaswamy accused Mr. Hannity of misrepresenting his views.

“You said aid to Israel, our No. 1 ally, only democracy in the region, should end in 2028,” Mr. Hannity stated within the interview. “And that they should be integrated with their neighbors.”

“That’s false,” Mr. Ramaswamy responded.

“I have an exact quote, do you want me to read it?” Mr. Hannity requested.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s rhetoric about help for Israel has shifted.

During a marketing campaign occasion in New Hampshire earlier this month, Mr. Ramaswamy called the deal to offer Israel with $38 billion over 10 years “sacrosanct.” But a couple of weeks later in an interview with The Free Beacon, a conservative web site, he stated that he hoped that Israel would “not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.” by 2028, when the deal expires.

Wearing masks

In the primary few months of the coronavirus pandemic, the Masks for All Act, a invoice proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont that aimed to offer each particular person within the United States with three free N95 masks, appeared to obtain an unlikely endorsement on Twitter — from Mr. Ramaswamy.

“My policy views don’t often align with Bernie, but this strikes me as a sensible idea,” he wrote in July 2020. “The cost is a tiny fraction of other less compelling federal expenditures on COVID-19.”

Mr. Ramaswamy was responding to an opinion column written for CNN by Mr. Sanders, who’s a democratic socialist, and Andy Slavitt, who was later a prime pandemic adviser to Mr. Biden. He stated they need to have picked somebody from the political proper as a co-author to point out that there was a consensus on masks.

But when he was pressed this summer time by Josie Glabach of the Red Headed Libertarian podcast about whether or not he had ever supported Mr. Sanders’s masks measure, he answered no.

When requested by The Times for additional clarification, Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged that he was an early supporter of sporting masks, however stated that he now not believed that they prevented the unfold of the virus. He accused his political opponents of conflating his preliminary stance with help for masks mandates, which he stated he had persistently opposed.

An analogy to Rosa Parks?

When he was requested by the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt on his show in June whether or not he would pardon the previous U.S. intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden for leaking paperwork in regards to the United States authorities’s surveillance applications, Mr. Ramaswamy stated sure and invoked an sudden title: the civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

He stated that Mr. Snowden, a fugitive, had demonstrated heroism to carry the federal government accountable.

“Part of what makes that risk admirable — Rosa Parks long ago — is the willingness to bear punishment he already has,” he stated. “That’s also why I would ensure that he was a free man.”

To Mr. Hewitt, the analogy was jarring.

“Wait, wait, wait, did you just compare Rosa Parks to Edward Snowden?” he stated.

Mr. Ramaswamy instantly distanced himself from such a comparability, whereas then reinforcing it, suggesting that that they had each effectuated progress of a unique type.

“No, I did not,” he stated. “But I did compare the aspect of their willingness to take a risk in order for at the time breaking a rule that at the time was punishable.”