‘No one can rank my Americanness’: Indian-origin Mehek Cooke backs Vivek Ramaswamy’s rejection of ‘heritage Americanism’
Indian-origin MAGA lawyer and ‘Trump surrogate’ Mehek Cooke weighed in on the growing debate inside the US conservative movement, saying that ‘Americanness ‘ cannot be ranked by ancestry. She backed GOP leader and fellow Indian-American Vivek Ramaswamy’s rejection of “heritage Americanism”.Posting on X, Cooke said that she came into the US legally and embraced the American culture: “I am American. I came here legally and assimilated, our laws, culture, and shared standards. No one gets to rank my Americanness. The real divide is not heritage. It is legality and assimilation. Spoke with Vivek Ramaswamy backstage after his speech. That clarity wins.”Her comments came after Ramaswamy delivered a fiery speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest event, where he criticised racism and antisemitism within sections of the right-wing movement, especially after recent comments of White nationalist and right-winger Nick Fuentes, who called vice president JD Vance’s Hindu-Indian wife Usha a “jeet.” Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek spoke to thousands of young conservatives and rejected the idea that Americans with colonial-era roots. He claimed that there is no reason someone is less of an American just because their families migrated more recently into the States.“The idea of a heritage American is about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up,” Ramaswamy compared the idea of heritage American to “woke left” during the address. He used an example of the MAGA chief himself: “It leads you to believe that Donald Trump is less of an American than Joe Biden, because Donald Trump’s mother was an immigrant.”Ramaswamy condemned hatred directed at any ethnic or religious group: “If you believe in normalizing hatred towards any ethnic group, towards whites, towards blacks, towards Hispanics, towards Jews, towards Indians, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement.”
Who is Mehek Cooke?
Mehek Cooke was born in India and moved to the United States as a child, later growing up in Ohio. As a trained lawyer, she now serves as president of American Frontier Strategies and has also worked in the Ohio Governor’s Office and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio.Cooke is a Trump loyalist and avid Republican who is also a regular media commentator. She has acted as a surrogate for the Republican National Committee, advising on immigration, elections and national security. Moreover, she agrees with Vive’s idea that identity within America should not be measured by lineage, but by commitment to the country’s culture.
