The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This week, Donald Trump and JD Vance expressed support for a disgusting new ad that’s running in the Ohio gubernatorial race. GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy aired a spot featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s mother questioning her truthfulness about her difficult childhood. Then it emerged that Acton’s stepfather appears to have raped her. So now it’s all backfiring on Trump, Vance, and Ramaswamy. Republicans have denounced the ad, and even MAGA is divided, and it probably makes a Democratic victory in Ohio more likely.
We think this captures a lot about the fundamental indecency of MAGA politics and the national reaction we’re seeing against it. So we’re talking to Jim Swift, senior editor at the Bulwark, who has a good piece on this whole fiasco. Jim, good to have you on.
Jim Swift: Greg, pleasure to be on your show.
Sargent: So most people have seen this ad by now, but we’re going to play a snippet. The speaker here is Donna Arthur, who’s the mother of Amy Acton. She’s the Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio. Listen.
Donna Arthur (voiceover): It’s not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help. And she can’t help you if she needs help herself.
Sargent: So eventually Vivek Ramaswamy took credit for this ad, but then we learned that Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, who’s Donna Arthur’s husband, was indicted for raping Acton when she was young. Jim, can you just bring us up to date on this?
Swift: The ad features, direct to camera, Donna Arthur, who is an older woman. Who was not in the ad was Cledith Arthur. Cledith Arthur was the man that Donna Arthur was married to. I do not believe he is the biological father of Amy Acton or her brother Philip Stearns, who has risen to her defense, both in statement and in commercials and video clips and everything.
And Arthur says that my daughter is a liar and she needs help, and, you know, how can you trust a liar to run your state? And, you know, the problem here is that Cledith Arthur, who she remained married to until Cledith died in 2004, was alleged to have raped Amy Acton, and also abused the brother, Philip Stearns.
And Amy and her brother became wards of the state. And she had a really rough childhood. She has an ad about growing up in a tent. She lived in a lot of places before she went off to medical school and got her life on track. And she had a really tough childhood.
And that’s part of the reason why people in the Ohio Republican establishment, particularly within the DeWine administration in which she had served, see this ad as horrific and disgusting. Because in their minds there’s no doubt of Amy Acton’s story here. There’s no doubt on her narrative.
Sargent: Right. And then Ramaswamy decided that this was good politics, because that’s what MAGA does. Donald Trump defended the ad, and he defended Ramaswamy’s role in it. Let’s listen to Trump.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I heard the mother went very rogue on the daughter, doesn’t have a lot of respect for the daughter, and I think the mother is a witness to things also, so who knows, and you have to figure that out. It’s a very unusual situation to have a mother hate a daughter that much, but I don’t think that has anything to do with Vivek.
Sargent: So Jim, that’s convoluted, but he clearly suggests the ad is raising legitimate points about Amy Acton. JD Vance went further, ripping into Republicans for, quote-unquote, whining about the ad.
Swift: My colleague Jonathan Last, in his great newsletter, The Triad, had kind of talked about what a sociopath Vance is. And the Haitian dogs and cats lie is still being felt here in southwest Ohio, where I live. You know, as is the tentacles of ICE that are coming in and just really ruining this community that had come to embrace the Haitians.
So when I saw JD Vance was coming—I was traveling back to Ohio from some work trips—I just knew nothing good would come of that, and lo and behold was proven correct. Because JD Vance, I think, kind of has a Nixon fetish, Greg. Like, and maybe he’ll try and finish it out in a way Ford didn’t. But this guy has no moral bottom.
Sargent: Well, now it’s all backfiring. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine just took the extraordinary step of condemning Ramaswamy for running the spot. DeWine said this: “It was wrong to run this ad. I would urge the Ramaswamy campaign to take this down.”
Then one GOP strategist told Time that, “We had a really good chance and then we do this two weeks out.” A second GOP strategist said, “We deserve to lose this race.”
This is the kind of story that I think could really blow up in Ramaswamy’s face. I mean, you wrote about this. Well, it is blowing up in his face, isn’t it?
Swift: Yeah, I think it is absolutely blowing up in his face. Trying to be Trump never works for people, as hard as they try, especially when it comes to escaping personal accountability for crimes or performative cruelty. It just shows when you’re being fake. And Vivek is many things, and I’m not sure he’s this cruel in his personal life.
And it does kind of come across as fake. Like, he doesn’t have the sincerity of twisting the knife, which is why he needs Trump and JD Vance, who are shameless and have no morals, to come and twist it for him. Because it really isn’t working.
And I think that as my colleague Will Sommer has reported, you know, there’s a lot in MAGA media world who are now having to kind of go along with this. You know, this is a command from the top, that this is acceptable, this is fair play.
And to see that put so brazenly on the air with no consideration of the victim, which happens to be his opponent—I think, really, I don’t know who looked at the focus group results from them and thought, we’re going to spend $4 million on this in the last two weeks, this is really our ticket to victory. It’s just bizarre.
So I do think it’s blown up in his face, and I don’t think there’s any righting the ship. There’s just going to be some people who’ve been ordered to play the fiddle and violin as the ship sinks.
Sargent: Well, I want to home in on a point you made there, which is that figures like Ramaswamy look at Donald Trump and decide that his depravity is what they have to imitate in order to kind of unlock that magic potion that gets them the Trump base, right?
Like, so Donald Trump’s approval rating in the new Fox News poll in Ohio is now 41 percent, and 58 percent disapprove. That’s in Ohio. This is a state Trump carried by double digits.
I’ve got to wonder whether imitating the most disgusting features of this guy who’s deeply underwater is the way to a victory statewide in Ohio. Is that a crazy question, or what? I mean, what are these guys thinking?
Swift: I think they’re willing to try anything at this point. I mean, of course, Greg, you cannot gerrymander a state—Ohio is a heavily gerrymandered state, but you can’t gerrymander statewide elections, right? So Republicans should be running away with this. You know, if Dave Yost, the attorney general, were the nominee, he’d probably be leading Amy Acton by five or six points.
I mean, I think Acton has run a very good campaign, but it’s helpful that she’s running against a candidate who said he wanted to shut down some of Ohio’s state colleges. We are very proud of our state colleges in Ohio.
It’s true, we have a lot of them. But he also proposed year-round school. He constantly steps on rakes and gives her a bow-wrapped gift of an ad every time he talks.
Sargent: What’s really striking to me is how divided MAGA is over this as well. You pointed out a little earlier that when Trump essentially defended the use of this in the ad, the command went out to MAGA that they had to defend this.
And so you do have figures like Ben Shapiro defending the ad now, calling criticism of it pearl clutching. You’ve got Glenn Beck defending it as well. Your colleague Will Sommer had a good piece on this.
But you’ve got some MAGA figures like Nick Fuentes criticizing the ad, saying, “What kind of person would run an ad like that?” Now, yes, that’s going to be wrapped up in racism against Ramaswamy, but still, it does appear MAGA’s divided. You had another Fuentes ally, James Fishback, condemning it. What do you make of that? It seems like mostly MAGA has kind of gotten in line.
I just want to bring up Megyn Kelly a little bit more here. She compared the ad to the infamous racist Willie Horton ad in the 1988 presidential race. And then she basically said, you know, George H.W. Bush won in 1988. So I guess that’s her way of saying that this was a good move.
Swift: Yeah. I think Republicans have had to grapple with the effects of Willie Horton for decades. And I think for a while we kind of got out of that. I mean, think about John McCain’s celebrity ad. You know, that wasn’t about racism. It wasn’t an effective ad.
But they were kind of like, he wants to be a world celebrity. And I think that the Republican Party itself tried to get away from that, but that all went out the window when Trump won.
Sargent: What interests me about this is that it’s focusing a whole lot of media attention on Amy Acton’s upbringing, and she grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. You know, that’s in Mahoning County, and the president was just in Youngstown. This is a critical area, and we wrote a piece on this at NewRepublic.com. Folks can check this out.
Mahoning is kind of like the epicenter of the place where blue-collar ancestral Dems moved to Trump, and it became, in the media mythology, sort of the center of Trumpism’s victory over Democrats. And so now you’ve got Acton being from Youngstown, and you’ve got Sherrod Brown, who’s highly competitive with working-class voters and is heavily contesting that area.
I think you could see Mahoning County go to Democrats. And that would be a very big deal, because the media treated this place as sort of the locus point of Trumpism’s rise for many, many years. Can the Democrats flip Mahoning?
Swift: I think it’s possible. The question is, how many people are willing to cross the aisle twice to vote for them both?
Sargent: And it would be seismic if Democrats were able to take back Mahoning, wouldn’t it, given its sort of storied place in the kind of history of Trumpism and its triumph in the Rust Belt?
Swift: I think it would. And if they don’t get it, I think they’ll get close. But I think we’re also going to see a lot of bleed in the 32 counties that kind of are south and to the west of Youngstown, that are known as Appalachia, because of the data centers.
That is proving hugely unpopular for Jon Husted in particular, and Vivek, who’ve both been on record as pro, where that’s not true in Brown’s case and it’s not true in Acton’s case.
Sargent: Well, let’s wrap this up, going big picture a little bit about what this means about MAGA politics. I think, reading your piece, which is very good—people should check it out, it’s at the Bulwark—what I take from all this is that people like Vivek and JD Vance still think Trumpism and MAGA is ascendant in some deep sense.
They think this type of politics, the depravity, the malevolence, the viciousness—they think that there’s still a large enough body of people out there, a latent body in the electorate somewhere that gets kind of flushed out of the woodwork by this kind of thing, to support them, to support Vivek and, you know, this ad.
But I think they’re misreading the situation. Going back to Trump being heavily underwater in Ohio, a state he won by double digits, what we’re really seeing is a kind of national rejection of this kind of politics.
And I don’t think people like Vance or Vivek are able to perceive that, that they’re not able to see that there’s this kind of backlash against their politics. Is that maybe a fair reading of what’s going on here?
Swift: I think so. I think that it’s also a failure of them to grapple with the reality that the people they need to win elections don’t turn out when Donald Trump himself is not on a ballot line. He might be metaphorically on the line, and he’s tried to make that—I’m on the ballot, you know, you saw that at the convention.
He is not. And unless he is truly on the ballot, there’s a huge swath of voters who don’t view this as existential, and they will not find a reason to vote if it suits their purposes. And for that I’m thankful.
Sargent: Well, and it sure sounds like these guys think that the way to get those voters out is with this kind of thing.
Swift: Yeah. I mean, maybe. But I think that they fail to see this connection, is that in the mind of those voters, it is all about Trump and Trumpism. It is not about MAGA and MAGA Inc.
And unless it’s the man himself, they aren’t going to show up as much. It’s like being told the Savannah Bananas are coming to play and it’s the two lower-tier teams. You don’t get as big of a sellout unless the Savannah Bananas are there.
Sargent: Well, Jim, do you expect Acton and Sherrod Brown to win their races?
Swift: I do. If you had asked me that two years ago when I moved here, I would have told you no. I also would have thought Sherrod Brown would have beaten Bernie Moreno, but I was wrong about that.
I do think it’s hard for a lot of people to cross the aisle and vote for two Democrats if they’re historically Republicans. I’ve got my own personal experience in that world. But I think enough will do it, and enough will stay home, where I think it’s quite likely both of them win.
Sargent: That would be really, really remarkable. And by the way, that has major implications for 2028, because it’s going to cast a lot of doubt on JD Vance’s political acumen and political instincts. People are going to really start to question that, because it’s JD Vance’s home state, and because JD Vance continues to go full MAGA.
And in the face of that, it sure looks like they’re kind of floundering, that they’re misreading the electorate. I think that’s going to become a clearer thing to a lot of people if what happens in Ohio is what you say is going to happen and the two of them win.
Swift: Yeah. I mean, we know that JD Vance has an accelerator and his foot on the pedal. The question is, how good are his brakes, and what’s the suspension like, because he is going 80 miles an hour down a cul-de-sac. I’m not sure he knows it yet. But how he will adapt, I’m sure we will see, because the man always adapts.
Sargent: That is really well put. Jim Swift, tell us more about Ohio soon, man. Come back on.
Swift: Thanks for having me. I would love to come back.