‘Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels’: Vivek Ramaswamy suggests Ron DeSantis uses height boosters at GOP debate

It evoked a silly mental picture, but that was the point.

In the opening minutes of the third GOP presidential debate, Vivek Ramaswamy landed a double hit on Ron DeSantis when he jointly referred to the Governor and Nikki Haley as “Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels.”

Ramaswamy’s reference to a former Vice President in semi-drag attire was meant to suggest DeSantis is part of the so-called “neoconservative establishment” — and doubled a reference to speculation that DeSantis wears lifts in his boots to enhance his height.

Ramaswamy delivered the crack after moderators asked DeSantis and Haley what they would have told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the Oct. 7 massacre by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

The two gave similar answers. DeSantis said he’d urge Netanyahu to “finish the job once and for all with these butchers” who would “wipe every Jew off the globe” if given the chance.

He then lashed out at President Joe Biden for not moving fast enough to bring U.S. citizens home after and highlighted Florida’s efforts to compensate through evacuation operations of its own.

“Biden’s neglect has been atrocious,” he said. “There’s a difference between words and deeds. We acted and saved lives.”

Haley, a former Ambassador to the United Nations, offered a similarly hawkish take on Israel’s response.

“The first thing I said to (Netanyahu) when it happened was, I said, ‘Finish them,’” she said before laying out how several of America’s adversaries — Iran, Syria, China and Russia — are in an “unholy alliance” against the West.

“The last thing we need to do is to tell Israel what to do. The only thing we should be doing is supporting them and eliminating Hamas (because) it’s not that Israel needs America; America needs Israel,” she said. “They are the tip of the spear when it comes to this Islamic terrorism.”

Ramaswamy said he’d “go one step further” by taking similar actions against illegal migrants with ill intent crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.

“I would tell (Netanyahu) to smoke those terrorists on his southern border and then I’ll tell him, as President of the United States, that I’ll be smoking those terrorists on our southern border,” he said.

He then delivered his zinger to a clamorous mixture of laughter and groans from the Miami audience.

“But we have to be careful to avoid making the mistakes from the neocon establishment of the past. Corrupt politicians in both parties spent trillions, killed millions, made billions for themselves in places like Iraq and Afghanistan fighting wars that sent thousands of our sons and daughters, people my age, to die in wars that did not advance anyone’s interests,” he said.

“Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden got a $5 million bribe from Ukraine. That’s why we’re sending 200 billion bucks back to the same country. And the fact of the matter is the Republican Party is not that much better. You have the likes of Nikki Haley, who stepped down from her time at the U.N. bankrupt or in debt. … Then she becomes a military contractor. She joins the board of Boeing … and is now a millionaire.

“I think that’s wrong, (so) do you want a leader from a different generation who is going to put this country first, or do you want Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels? Because we have two of them on this stage tonight.”

Haley fired back about four minutes later, asserting that “they’re five-inch heels, and I don’t wear them unless you can run in them.”

The crowd erupted in applause.

DeSantis opted not to acknowledge the slight, instead pivoting to a denouncement of the eruption of antisemitism on college campuses nationwide — an issue, he said, that he’s handling better in Florida than Biden is federally.