Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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?
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 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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 this ad.
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 a backlash against their politics. Is that a fair reading of what’s going on here?
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.
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.
Sargent: Well, Jim, do you expect Acton and Sherrod Brown to win their races?
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.
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.
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.
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