Earlier this week, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Released an attack ad featuring a woman named Donna ArthurThe estranged mother of his rival, physician and researcher Amy Acton. Almost immediately, the spot unleashed a storm of condemnation and debate that has fractured the Republican coalition on the eve of the largely consequential midterm elections.
In the ad, Arthur alleges that his daughter, Acton, is a “liar”. “It’s not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem,” says Arthur. Advertisement — Direct condemnation of a candidate by a family member — is the kind of political blow that is often devastating to a campaign or a candidate’s character, which was clearly Ramaswamy’s intention. But the tragic and well-documented facts of Acton’s life exposed Ramaswamy’s tactics to a new low for his campaign and party. Acton, 60, has been Talk openly about her traumatic early life: She reportedly suffered horrific sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s husband, who was arrested for raping her in 1978. Acton’s mother, Arthur, supported her husband in court and remained with him until her death in 2004.
Inside the Republican Party, reaction to the ad has become a litmus test for how deeply one is willing to sink into the post-truth nihilism of the MAGA movement, with everyone playing a predictable role.
Lines were drawn almost immediately. Ramaswami’s campaign doubled down, saying spend $4 million To advertise on TV. On Friday, Donald Trump engaged in a heated exchange with an NBC reporter over the ad, and repeatedly defended Ramaswamy’s decision to use the material.
“Look … a mother is saying, ‘Don’t put my daughter in there because she’s a terrible person and a liar,'” Trump said. “Why shouldn’t anyone use it?”
When the NBC reporter pushed back by mentioning the abuse allegations, Trump gave an extended speech and insisted: “I don’t know anything about stepfathers.”
Trump’s support for the ad puts him in direct conflict with many Ohio Republicans, who have decided that Ramaswamy’s cynical drama has gone too far. Current Governor Mike DeWine The ad was described as “deep, deeply disturbing,”For which the President promptly called him a “RINO,” or Republican in Name Only. Senator Jon Husted, whose ass Trump can’t stop admiring on the campaign trail, Also condemned the advertisementSaying he “wouldn’t have driven” it. Former Governor John Kasich and former Senator Rob Portman also came out in opposition to the ad. Of course, the only high-profile Ohioan to support the ad was Vice President JD Vance, who said the ad “Calls it like it is.”
It’s easy to see the ad as a flashpoint in the escalating war for the soul of the Grand Old Party — a “calculation,” as one longtime strategist put it to me earlier this month. In the new York TimesOpinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that “condemning the Ramaswami ad gives conservatives an opportunity to attempt to pull their movement out of the Trumpist gutter.” There are two sides of Republicans who want to go back to the style of polite conservatism like John McCain, Mitt Romney, want to take back some of the spoils of the Trump era; and post-civilization radicals who see Trump’s moral nihilism as a blueprint for seizing political power. “Trump has owned the GOP for the last 11, 12, 13 years,” one conservative activist told me earlier this month. “Everyone is upset about it.”
However, these criticisms ignore the larger point of the political movement that led to Vivek Ramaswamy indirectly taking the side of a child molester. The greatest strength of the conservative project is its moral flexibility. As one conservative strategist has described it, the reason Trump has “dominated the GOP” for more than a decade is because he won. Trumpism, and the brand of politics it inspires, has been hugely successful. Those moderates who were uncomfortable with this were almost unanimously acquiesced or expelled from the party. The future of the GOP is still firmly in Trump’s hands.
In that system, Ramaswamy’s ad is not defensible for only one reason: it failed. Take Politico’s line: “This place is not just bad taste, it’s also bad politics.” Taste is immaterial. Not bad politics. There is now a possibility that the extent of Ramaswamy’s barbarism will harm him politically, and the quick rejection from other candidates like Husted is merely to try to minimize that damage.
In this case, there was no shock. But don’t think for a second that the MAG movement will hesitate to stoop that low again.