HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?

I Know the Horror MAGA Vivek’s Despicable Attack Ad Is Trampling On

A Daily Beast writer exposes the searing private pain the Ohio Republican cares nothing about abusing.

Opinion

For much of her childhood and teenage years, my wife felt her mother didn’t make her children her priority.

When her mother had to make important, life-changing decisions, she always sided with her husband, my wife’s stepfather.

She wasn’t a bad woman, but she was so enamored with her new husband that she was willing to sacrifice her children’s happiness.

And I am convinced that childhood stress had a deeply profound effect on my wife’s life, and ultimately played a part in her death from cancer at the age of 59.

The only reason I am writing about this now is that my mother-in-law has also passed away. She regretted her choices to the day she died.

Even now, I would never make the intimate details of their family trauma public. Many American families have their own struggles; after all, they vary in degree and are all important.

In many ways, they are the story of our country. Our families are bound by them, for better and for worse. Unless we choose otherwise—or our laws are violated—they generally remain private.

All of which makes Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to manipulate an old woman and pry publicly inside a family’s hurt for his own political gain so despicable.

In Ramaswamy’s $4 million attack ad, Donna Arthur, the 82-year-old mother of his Democratic Party opponent in the Ohio governor’s race, Amy Acton, is filmed calling her daughter a “liar.”

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Arthur’s husband, Cledith Arthur, was accused of raping Acton, his stepdaughter, when she was a child. “It’s not easy for a mother to say this,” said Arthur, “but Amy was a serious problem. She is a liar; she lies about her past.”

“Despicable” is a word that keeps coming up as lawmakers, including some Republicans, denounce the exploitative TV spot.

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“It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” said Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns. “Our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died. 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.”

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Long before she entered politics, Acton, now 60, chose to go public with some details of her difficult childhood, including living in a tent for a year. She later became a doctor and, as the state’s health director, led Ohio’s COVID response in the early months of the pandemic.

The gubernatorial candidate has been estranged from her mother since 1978, when Arthur stood by her husband in court. He died in 2004, aged 69.

Whatever your politics, it is admirable that she overcame a tough start to reach a position where she can campaign for the governor’s mansion.

But in Trump’s world—a world Vivek Ramaswamy is very much a part of—apologizing or showing any remorse is seen as weakness. So what does he do? He doubles down because the ad apparently performed well with “persuadable” voters.

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Even worse, JD Vance, a vocal Catholic and the second most powerful figure in the country who has four children, one of whom is a daughter, doubles down as well.

“Now the media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because guess what? Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial, which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” the vice president told a cheering MAGA crowd in Ohio. Ramaswamy applauded and acknowledged Vance.

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Attack ads are hardly new. In his 1796 election battle with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams was mocked for being overweight and nicknamed “His Rotundity,” starting generations of the practice.

The Swift Boat ads questioning John Kerry’s Vietnam War service effectively derailed his 2004 presidential campaign against George W. Bush. TV screens are full of candidates demeaning their opponents around election time.

But this unapologetic attack on one family’s most painful past is beyond the pale.

Even George W. Bush’s brother, Neil, has had enough of the MAGA malaise. He said on Wednesday that he was crossing party lines and voting for Democrat James Talarico in Texas on November 3, saying he was “deeply troubled” by the exploits of Trump’s Senate pick Ken Paxton.

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And the reason for the moral vacuum that threatens to overshadow everything that the world’s defining democracy represents was exemplified in the Oval Office on Tuesday when Trump suggested a veteran White House journalist was “sick” because he dared to ask a question.

In the hours that followed, Vance piled on, calling the reporter an “imbecile”, and, even worse, the White House circulated a social media post branding Feinberg a “mongoloid.”

By any measure, that term is unacceptable.

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There was no apology from Trump. Of course there wasn’t. This is the president who posted a video editing Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces onto the bodies of apes. Who called a female reporter “piggy” when she asked him about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Who posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ.

On Wednesday evening, in a scene that has been uncomfortably familiar during Trump’s second term, he accused CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and a female ABC reporter of being “stupid,” “low IQ,” and a “dummy.”

There is no shame. No humility. It’s reflected across the MAGA universe.

Trump and, especially, Vance talk about their religion giving their lives meaning. Then they practice meanness.

Politics is still about people. It is about families wanting better lives for their children. Not calling them liars.

It should be about a robust exchange of views. Not throwing dirt.

We should choose the very best to represent us.

Instead, we sometimes choose the worst.

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David GardnerChief National Correspondent

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