Vivek Ramaswamy to ‘leave the rapping to the real Slim Shady’ after Eminem licenser’s cease-and-desist letter

Turns out he was just imitating.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has announced that he’ll no longer rap to Eminem’s music on the campaign trail after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the rapper’s music licenser. 

“Yeah, look, I think that I’ll respect his wishes, but I would just say, will the real Slim Shady please stand up?” Ramaswamy, 38, told MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday, referencing Eminem’s alter ego and his hit 2000 song. 

The Ramaswamy campaign team received the cease-and-desist letter from music licensing company BMI 11 days after the biotech entrepreneur spit a few bars of the artist formerly known as Marshall Mathers’ 2002 hit “Lose Yourself” at the Iowa State Fair, in response to Gov. Kim Reynolds asking Ramaswamy to name his favorite walkout song.

BMI informed the campaign that it had “received communications from Marshall B. Mathers III, professionally known as Eminem, objecting to the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign’s use of Eminem’s musical compositions (the ‘Eminem Works’) and requesting that BMI remove all Eminem Works from the Agreement.” 

The company demanded that Ramaswamy no longer perform Eminem’s tunes on the campaign trail. 

“Vivek just got on the stage and cut loose. To the American people’s chagrin, we will have to leave the rapping to the real Slim Shady,” the Ramaswamy campaign told The Post on Monday. 

Ramaswamy, who rapped under the stage name Da Vek as a Harvard undergrad, blasted the Grammy-award winning rapper on Tuesday for sending the cease-and-desist notice. 

“Eminem, in his rise, used to be a guy who actually stood up to the establishment and said the things that the establishment didn’t want him to say,” the GOP candidate told Mitchell.  

“I think the fact that my political viewpoints may differ from his, I think people change over the course of their lives, but I have hope for him that he will one day rediscover the renegade that made him great, and I’m rooting for that success in his life,” he added. 

Ramaswamy has previously praised Eminem as a “guy in every sense who was not supposed to be doing what he did.”