GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy pushed back on “The Breakfast Club” co-host Charlamagne tha God’s claims that the United States, where he has done well and has made a great living, has made virtually no progress in terms of equality and race during a Tuesday appearance.

“The country has never fulfilled its promises of freedom, justice, and liberty for all. It has always been freedom, liberty, and justice for some, and usually that ‘some’ is white people,” the host claimed.

“Here’s what I would say in response to that. It is obviously true that the nation has fallen short of our promise since our founding. But walk through some obvious facts about America. We’re not founded on an ethnicity or a monarch or a food or even a religion, we’re founded on a set of ideals that brought a group of people together in 1776, and we live by those ideals, at least, we aspire to those ideals today,” Ramaswamy said. “A nation that aspires to ideals that is not made up of gods but made up of human beings will always fall short of those ideals.

“I think our worst hypocrisies as a country, and we have many of them, are our best evidence that we have ideals at all. Look at the Chinese Communist Party, no one ever calls China or Iran a hypocrite, why is that? Because to be a hypocrite, you have to at least have ideals in the first place,” he added.

“So we’re imperfect, but we’re about the pursuit of a more perfect union. So America is about the pursuit, and so I think trashing ourselves –” he continued before Charlamagne cut in.

“All I said is we never were included in those ideals originally,” he said.

“Originally. Never and originally are two different things. Originally that is true. Over 250 years of progress, if you had somebody who was in 1870, looking at the world we live in today. If you had somebody in 1960 who was looking at the world that exists today, as it relates to race in America, we would be darn close to what they thought of as the promised land,” the candidate and entrepreneur said.

“So I think we have to recognize that America is about that pursuit. We’re a lot further along than we were 250 years ago. And here’s the other thing too, we gotta set our expectations, we will always fall short of our ideals,” Ramaswamy continued.

“By definition, if there are human beings and not gods living in a nation that aspires to ideals, we are fallen. Man is fallen. That’s what makes us who we are. But what makes us different than animals is we have ideals. America is founded on our humanity, that we can believe and aspire to something we will still fall short of. That’s what makes this country beautiful,” he added.

Then he issued a challenge to the host.

“That’s why I’m in this. I care about reviving pride in that nation. If we get in the habit of bashing that country, what are we bashing? The last, best hope man has to aspire to those ideals. Tell me who else has done better. I’ll wait,” he said.