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Hey, good morning. I'm Playbook co-author Rachel Bade. It's Thursday, August 15th.

And we're trying out something new today, taking a phone interview we're using to lead the newsletter this morning

and adding an audio component from the call. So you'll get a chance to hear from the subject himself.

Vivek Ramoswamy. The former 2024 presidential hopeful and Trump ally is doing something rather novel recently.

He's raising alarms about the tone and message of the Trump campaign, encouraging the former president

and the party writ large to focus on policy, not personal attacks.

Essentially, he's calling for a reset. Now, pretty much all of my Republican sources have been saying

these sorts of things for weeks now, only be vague, is saying them on record. I caught up with

Ramoswami as he was driving across Ohio yesterday with his family, and here are some excerpts

from our interview.

So you have been blitzing the airwaves with your call for reset in the Trump campaign.

For our listeners who haven't caught your recent interviews, though, just sort of take us through this. What do you think Trump and Republicans writ large are doing wrong right now, or what should

they be doing more of? I see a missed opportunity, but I am keen to make sure we

get on that right course, which is to go after her policy record. On one hand, it seems difficult

to do this because she hasn't offered clear policies as a presidential candidate this time around.

But to me, that's no excuse because she's been a U.S. senator, she's been a vice president,

and she's been a 2020 presidential candidate as well that provides, I think, a very fertile

basis for drawing policy contrasts that I don't think we have done a good enough job yet

of drawing. I think if this election devolves into each side making its case for why 70 million

voters on the other side are weird, and I think that is a step that the IRS Walls campaign has taken,

I don't think that's going to be good for America. I think that it is a 2024 version of the 2016 basket of deplorables.

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