On a Friday afternoon in 2024, Vivek Ramaswamy arrived at a Raising Cane’s restaurant on Olentangy Road in Columbus expecting to meet Ohio State head football coach Ryan Day and speak to the team. He brought an entourage of five people, including a security escort, arriving in a black Cadillac Escalade. Neither Day nor any Ohio State players were present.
The meeting had been fabricated — arranged through weeks of text message exchanges with Columbus-based progressive blogger D.J. Byrnes, who posed as a fictional Ohio State football staffer in his newsletter, The Rooster. Ramaswamy is now the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, having won the May 5 primary with more than 82 percent of the vote. He faces Democrat Amy Acton, a physician and former Ohio Department of Health director, in the November general election.