President Donald Trump’s brand of brash, sometimes offensive, politics has consumed the Republican Party for a decade. But bipartisan outrage over Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring his opponent’s estranged mother shows how candidates often fail when they try to embody the president’s bombast.
Ramaswamy, an Ohio Republican running for governor against Democrat Amy Acton, a former public health official, gained national prominence as the 2024 presidential candidate who sought to mimic Trump’s brand of shock-jock politics, confronting his rivals in public and working the sidelines of social media to rile and excite supporters.
Ramaswamy’s newest ad features Acton’s mother calling her a “liar,” even as documents show that Acton and her brother were removed from her home as children after her stepfather was charged with raping Acton.
Political operatives in both parties called the ad an extension of Trump’s no-holds-barred politics that catapulted him to the presidency in 2016. Trump’s rise was fueled by a Republican ecosystem — much of it online — that has been increasingly shaped in his image over the past decade.
And Trump defended Ramaswamy in an online post on Thursday, calling the ad “very powerful” and writing that criticism is meant only to “damage, demean, and embarrass a Republican.”
But the swift bipartisan blowback the ad has received suggests there are limits to the party’s attack-first strategy, both now and potentially when Trump eventually steps off the stage in 2028.
Mike DeWine, Ohio’s outgoing Republican governor, on Thursday became the latest, and perhaps most significant, figure to denounce the ad, which began airing this week.
“The ad, on its face, is deeply, deeply troubling,” said DeWine, who endorsed Ramaswamy. “It’s wrong to run this ad.”
That echoed comments made Wednesday by Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican whose reelection campaign is pivotal to his party’s hopes of holding on to Senate control. “I would not have run that ad,” Husted said.
The string of high-profile denunciations has introduced a level of panic in a red state where Republicans were already concerned with polls showing they could lose critical races.
“The floor may have just fallen out from under the Republican campaign for Ohio Governor,” former congressman James B. Renacci, an Ohio Republican who has run for Senate and governor in the state, said in a lengthy overnight post on X Thursday. “And any Republican who fails to distance themselves from this ad risks taking on water as well.”
The blowback to Ramaswamy’s ad has not been universal.
Ramaswamy has not only defended the spot, but his campaign has pledged to put $4 million behind it. “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,” he told reporters earlier this week.
The Ramaswamy campaign decided to put money behind the ads after testing with focus groups showed they were effective, a person briefed on the research told The Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.
Vice President JD Vance, while campaigning in Ohio on Wednesday, said he was “a little bit disgusted” by Republicans who were “whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.”
And Shannon Burns, head of one of the state’s largest Republican organizations, said the ad has “lit a fuse under a dormant base.”
“No matter what the talking heads say or the people who are clutching their pearls say, the Republican base is what matters for Vivek to win,” Burns said. “If the Republican base turns out, we win.”
Polls show that voters are disheartened by the tone of American politics, including Republicans who have backed Trump. A Gallup survey released late last year found 69 percent of Americans believe the Republican Party and Republicans have gone too far with the use of inflammatory language to attack their opponents, while 60 percent believe the same of Democrats and the Democratic Party.
“Our politics is a reflection of us, and I think that is where we are at as a country, and so our campaigns are reflecting that,” said Jason Savage, a longtime Republican operative in Maine who used to run the Maine Republican Party. He argued that too many Republican candidates try “to replicate something they saw before.”
“People don’t really need you to be Donald Trump,” Savage said. “They need you to be you.”
This question is particularly potent for Vance, who is openly considering a 2028 campaign and has embraced much of Trump’s style.
“Politics is a tough business,” Vance said, while publicly reflecting on the ad.
Vance’s response angered Republicans who may run against him in 2028.
“Vice President Vance said today that whether this ad by Vivek Ramaswamy was appropriate was not really his concern,” Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a possible 2028 candidate, told The Post. “Seriously?”
Christie added: “Vance’s acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease that we should be seeking to cure.”
Another person formerly close to Trump said the ad was among the clearest examples of the pitfalls of mimicking Trump.
“Trump is an aberration in American politics. So even if it has been successful for him … I am not sure it is readily transferrable to other people,” said John Bolton, a longtime Republican figure who served in Trump’s first term before breaking with the president.
Because Trump’s movement is based more on personality that a set of unifying issues, there is little for his successors to grasp beyond his style, he said.
“There really isn’t an -ism to pass on,” Bolton said.
Some Republicans argued that Trump’s brand of politics often only works when the political environment is behind him. He is now at his lowest ebb in polls, which show deep anger toward Trump over the economy and high gas prices.
In 2016, his bluster met an electorate frustrated by eight years of Democratic control of the White House and the prospect that a second politician from the same family, Hillary Clinton, might become president. In 2024, Trump’s constant attacks on President Joe Biden and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris met a restive electorate that felt the Democratic administration was telling them the economy was strong and didn’t understand the pain of high prices.
“But the problem unique to this cycle is that nobody cares about a politician having sharp elbows and ‘owning the libs’ when they can’t even afford groceries, a tank of gas and other basic necessities,” said a Republican operative involved in multiple races who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about his party’s candidates.
Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.
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