Republican presidential candidates Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy sparred on stage after candidates were asked whether or not they believed human behavior is causing climate change.
“I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for so I can say this: The climate change agenda is a hoax,” Ramaswamy said, prompting boos from the audience.
“The reality is the anti-carbon agenda is the wet blanket on our economy. And so the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change,” he said.
Christie then interrupted to say he’d “had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT,” and knocked Ramaswamy’s opening line from earlier in the program.
“The last person in one of these debates … who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What is a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama. And I am afraid we are dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the stage tonight,” Christie said.
Ramaswamy pitched himself at the start of the debate as “not a politician” and representative of a younger generation that could better control the White House than some of his fellow older competitors.
“Let me just address the question that is on everybody’s mind at home tonight. Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name, and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?” Ramaswamy had said at the start of the debate.