I’ve never seen a viler ad.
By now, you almost certainly know the story. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, posted an ad featuring a malicious attack on Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent. The ad starred Acton’s own mother, a woman named Donna Arthur.
The family story here is evil. Arthur married a man named Cledith Arthur, who became Acton’s stepfather. Cledith Arthur was indicted when Acton was 12 for raping her. He fled the jurisdiction rather than face charges.
Donna lost custody of her children and — as Charles Hilu at National Review reported — she has her own criminal history. She was convicted of theft by deception in the 1990s and accused of animal neglect in 2021.
It’s hard to imagine a more cruel and evil act than raping a child. There is no betrayal greater than the betrayal of a child by a parent. And then Ramaswamy compounded that betrayal by wielding that evil mother as a weapon against her own daughter.
I’m reminded of Sir Thomas More’s famous line in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons”: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales!”
But for Ohio, Vivek?
Long ago we learned that there is no bottom for MAGA, and there is still no bottom to this scandal. If Ramaswamy had a molecule of decency, he would take the ad down and apologize. Instead, he attacked Acton. “It is an ad from our campaign,” he said. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. Unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues. She won’t debate me. She doesn’t allow cameras at her events.”
At a rally in Ohio, JD Vance, the former junior senator from Ohio and the vice president of the United States, weighed in, praising Ramaswamy. “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” he said.
Vance, of course, is no stranger to malicious lies. He trafficked in the slanderous “Haitians eating pets” stories during the 2024 presidential campaign. There was never any credible evidence supporting those claims, yet he spread them anyway — even as Haitians faced death threats as the rumors metastasized across the body politic.
At the time, Vance told CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
After Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, denounced the Ramaswamy ad (though he did not withdraw his support for Ramaswamy), President Trump took to Truth Social, condemned DeWine as a “RINO,” and said: “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’ ”
At a rally, Trump said that he told Ramaswamy to “leave it up and look upstairs and say, ‘Thank you God very much, I appreciate it.’ ”
“I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody,” he said.
If there were a column hall of fame, Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic called “The Cruelty Is the Point” should hold a place of honor. Rarely has a single piece so completely captured the zeitgeist of a movement.
Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” Serwer wrote. “It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.”
Serwer wrote those words eight years ago, when cruelty was already central to the entire MAGA enterprise. Trump supporters delight in Trump’s cruelty, of course, but they also engage in their own vile speech and actions as a virtual initiation rite into the MAGA movement — it’s the way that they demonstrate that they have the courage necessary to take on the left.
Indeed, in a Truth Social post, Trump applauded the “courage” of Acton’s mother. Vance, as I said, praised the ad’s “audacity.”
This perversion of the concept of courage is central to the MAGA ethos. In MAGA’s account of history, the Republican Party before Trump was a collection of cowards and quislings — people who knew the right thing to do but refused to do so because they were desperate for the approval of progressives.
That’s the origin of the famous (in conservative circles) “D.C. cocktail party” smear — the idea that conservative convictions crumble the instant that conservatives get access to elite institutions or the moment that they get the first taste of elite approval. I’ve faced this accusation for more than a decade, ever since I said I could never support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.
In other words, there are no genuine arguments about policy or morality, there are only two kinds of people: the strong and the weak (Vance accused Republicans who condemned the ad as “whining”). Or as Shane Vaughn, a Trump-supporting pastor said in an online rant defending Ramaswamy: “Quit being soft. Quit being gay. Quit being spineless. Quit falling. We are in a war!” And one way to tell that you’re strong is if the left loathes you. The more the left hates you, the more righteous you are.
In fact, this is a less obvious reason for evangelicals’ continued support for Trump. From a young age, evangelicals are taught that they’ll be hated by the world. They’re taught to prepare for persecution, and when the secular left is angry at them, that’s treated as proof that they’re on the righteous path. It’s a message I heard for much of my life.
In the words of a common saying I’ve heard on the right, “If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.”
As a result, there is a powerful incentive to intentionally trigger outrage. That’s how you establish your credibility. There’s nothing new about this — The Daily Wire, a right-wing media company, has long sold a tumbler that says “LEFTIST TEARS” for example — but with every passing year it gets worse.
A cohort of far-right supporters of Vance, for example, are fond of using the acronym WAGTFKY, which stands for “we are going to f**king kill you” as a kind of in-group signaling of their own hatred and aggression. They’re living examples of Vance’s own morality. During his campaign for Senate, he made his values clear — “I think our people hate the right people,” he said.
And then he put his hatred into practice, in one of the most powerful offices in the land.
That behavior should be self-defeating, and as a potential blue wave looms in November, it might be. Many Republicans are growing very weary of Trump and — crucially — of Trump’s most aggressive supporters. One thing that was very clear when I traveled to Texas to report on the U.S. Senate race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is that a meaningful number of Republicans were seething with anger and resentment toward MAGA. They were tired of being bullied. They were tired of MAGA’s corruption. Some were even open to voting for Democrats.
But they were also extremely reluctant to go on the record.
And that shows exactly how MAGA survives. Every act of resistance to MAGA carries a profound cost. The bullies are loud, the good people are often quiet, and when the good people do summon up the courage and decency to decry hatred on the right — as DeWine and many of my friends at National Review have done — they often face the wrath of the president of the United States. They will be the “RINO” in one of Trump’s vicious rants.
Given enough time, every institution takes on the character of its leader. Trump is a cruel man, he leads a cruel movement and only the total defeat of both can free the nation from their malign control.
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