President Donald Trump won Ohio by 11 points in 2024. Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP’s candidate for governor in the Buckeye State, was trailing his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, by seven points in a Marist poll released yesterday. Ramaswamy now hopes to revive his campaign in the most morally depraved way imaginable: by siding with the man who raped his opponent when she was 12 years old.
Ramaswamy’s campaign admitted this week that it was behind a grotesque attack ad targeting Acton that featured Donna Arthur, her mother. In the ad, Arthur calls her daughter a liar and tells voters not to vote for her in the upcoming election. “Don’t let her become your governor,” Arthur says. “If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself. It will only get worse.”
What the ad does not mention is that Acton is estranged from her mother and has not spoken to her since Arthur lost custody of her children in the late 1970s. Acton accused her mother’s husband, Cledith Arthur, of abusing her as a child, in 1978. Acton’s father reported it to the police, who found it credible—the man had faced prior allegations before—and a local prosecutor brought criminal charges against him.
Before he could be brought to trial, Cledith fled town. Donna Arthur sided with Cledith over her own daughter. She lost custody of her children and remained married to him until his death in 2004. Acton told the Youngstown Vindicator in 2019 that she had last seen her mother in the courthouse after he was charged. “I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away,” Acton said. “That was the last time I ever saw her.”
A copy of the Ramaswamy ad circulated without the usual disclaimer language from a candidate, raising initial questions about who was responsible for it. The ad drew a furious response from Phillip Stearns, Acton’s brother, who denounced Ramaswamy and his mother in a statement. “After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died,” he said. “This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core—a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”
Ramaswamy has previously mocked the abuse that Acton experienced. At one rally, he told voters that as Ohio’s governor, he would “lay out a positive vision for our state, versus a governor who has none at all other than to complain about what someone else did to her.” His campaign initially demurred on whether it was connected to the Donna Arthur ad, out of cowardice, only to admit it was responsible and double down by committing $4 million to broadcast it.
“We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020, but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor,” Ramaswamy campaign spokesperson Connie Luck told reporters before the campaign acknowledged it was behind the ad.
Ramaswamy’s ad is morally reprehensible and electorally disqualifying. It demonstrates utter contempt for survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence. It is also unsurprising. Protecting abusers is an organizing principle of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
Ten years ago this month, The Washington Post released a 2005 video of then-candidate Donald Trump bragging to an Access Hollywood host about his penchant for trying to have sex with married women and sexually assaulting them.
“I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,” Trump said in the clip. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” The footage led to widespread condemnation and multiple calls for him to drop out of the race. Trump instead defended the comments as “locker room talk,” then, a few days later, brought women who had previously accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct to his second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton.
To support Trump’s political career is to be comfortable with his abuses. Roughly two dozen women have alleged that Trump harassed or assaulted them over the last four decades. He has never been charged with a crime for these allegations, and he has disputed or denied all of the allegations over the years. E. Jean Carroll, who said in 2019 that Trump had raped her in the mid-1990s in a Manhattan department store, was awarded $5 million by a New York jury after she sued Trump for defamation after he said she was “totally lying.”
Two members of Trump’s second-term Cabinet have faced allegations of domestic abuse and/or sexual assault. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reportedly paid a woman $50,000 after she accused him of sexual assault in 2017. Republican senators threatened to vote against his confirmation over the allegations, only to bow to pressure from the White House and, in particular, Vice President JD Vance.
When a former nanny said Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had groped her in the 1990s, during his 2024 presidential campaign, he simply replied, “I am not a church boy.” The allegations barely factored into his confirmation process as secretary of health and human services last year; every Republican senator voted to confirm him except Mitch McConnell, who rejected Kennedy’s views on vaccines.
Trump even tried to install a third Cabinet member with a history of sexual misconduct allegations when he nominated former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general. That nomination only failed because so many congressional Republicans found Gaetz to be personally loathsome. A wave of leaks followed about a then-impending House Ethics Committee report that, among other things, said Gaetz had paid a 17-year-old girl for sex when he was 35 years old. Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration the following week.
Then there’s Jeffrey Epstein. Trump had a long-standing friendship with the billionaire sex trafficker that persisted well after Epstein’s first encounter with federal prosecutors in the 2000s. (He died in federal custody in 2018 while awaiting trial on a second bout of charges.) Trump allies hoped to crack open the Epstein files in the Justice Department’s possession to implicate Democrats in a wide-ranging scheme of child sex trafficking. What they revealed instead was strong evidence that Trump was personally aware of Epstein’s activities, as well as some unverified allegations that he partook in them.
Among the material was a signed birthday note from Trump to Epstein where the two men have an imagined conversation about their friendship. “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” Trump’s character says in the note. “Yes, we do, come to think of it,” Epstein’s character replied. “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” Trump’s character said. The note ends with “Donald” wishing “Jeffrey” a “happy birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.” The entire conversation takes place in a female silhouette depicted with underdeveloped breasts.
Republicans have stood by Trump and supported him through all of this. Any GOP officials who could not stomach his personal depravity or his public misconduct have long since left the party or politics altogether. Those without moral compasses, who were willing to do or say nearly anything for the blind pursuit of power, were happy and willing to replace them. The Republican electorate has not punished them for their sins; if anything, a great many Americans seem eager to indulge in them.
For Ramaswamy, who has faced no such allegations himself, the ad provides a chance to express his sympathy with this malignant fraternity. Ramaswamy has faced no shortage of racist vitriol from his right flank during this campaign. In April, rival GOP candidate Casey Putsch released a video where he said, “Hey Vivek, want to play Cowboys versus Indians?” then turned to fire a rifle three times. “Don’t worry, it’s feather, not dot,” Putsch added.
Now a number of right-wing commentators openly talk about the “Indian question” in education and employment. Ramaswamy can’t change his appearance or background to appeal to white Trump supporters in rural Ohio, of course. But he can declare his allegiance with them in other ways. What could be more Trumpian, after all, than using a Democratic woman’s experience with childhood sexual abuse against her? No amount of tariff policy papers or anti-woke rhetoric can compare to the intoxicating thrill that the virulent, violent hatred of women can provide for them.
Nor will Trump’s eventual departure from American politics restore any semblance of moral thinking to the American right. Vance, the president’s heir apparent, did not distance himself from Ramaswamy’s ad. To the contrary, he castigated other conservatives for distancing themselves from it, then blamed the entire thing on the other side.
“And now the media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because, guess what?” Vance told a rally on Wednesday. “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.” Only a movement led by Donald Trump could think that embracing a child molester who has been dead for more than 20 years is a winning strategy in the midterms. Ohio voters must now prove that they reject this antinomian depravity, as well.