One of Us

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Not every Republican from Ohio is sleazy.

 

Take Sen. Jon Husted. He’s as normal-seeming a human as any modern right-winger can be, unremarkable in every way—save one. “I looked at his ass,” the president said of Husted yesterday. “I said, ‘His ass, s—t, it’s like, it’s like a pile of muscle.’” That was the second time this month that the commander in chief interrupted a rally to remark upon Husted’s cake.

 

If the weirdest thing about you is that your booty turned Donald Trump gay, you’re doing well for yourself by GOP standards.

 

So, no, not every Republican from Ohio is sleazy. But it does often feel like all of the sleaziest Republicans are from Ohio.

 

There’s Rep. Max Miller, allegedly so menacing to the women in his life that his former father-in-law has accused him of needing “serious psychological help” and once said, “I hold my breath every minute [Miller] has custody of my granddaughter.” That former father-in-law is U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a fellow Republican.

 

Unbothered, the president gave Miller a shout-out from the podium at a rally in Youngstown earlier this month.

 

J.D. Vance is also a Buckeye. In a party full of careerists willing to sell their souls to postliberalism to get ahead, no one sold as eagerly—or got as much in return—as our erstwhile Never Trumper vice president. What Vance lacks in demagogic charisma, he makes up for with effort: At any moment you might find him smearing an opponent as pedophilic, passing along Internet hysteria about immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, accusing congressional Democrats of plotting to literally burn down America, and pretending not to notice that his boss and patron is a racketeer.

 

He refuses, and will continue to refuse for selfish and cynical reasons, to say a harsh word about his friend Tucker Carlson, even as Tucker’s politics branch out from antisemitism into, er, anti-anti-bestiality.

 

And then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy, a native son of Cincinnati and a man so personally obnoxious that Nikki Haley once called him “scum” at a Republican presidential debate.

 

Ramaswamy is his party’s candidate for governor in Ohio this year, but he’s always been a strange fit for the Trumpist GOP. A meaningful percentage of the right’s nationalist base doesn’t care for “his kind,” resentful of the economic and political influence that Indian Americans are gaining. (Vivek is painfully aware of this.) But he’s an odd duck in another way: Ramaswamy is the platonic ideal of an overachiever, a brilliant fast-talking mega-rich nerd with multiple Ivy League degrees who palpably believes he’s the smartest person in any room he happens to be in. And is often correct, I suspect.

 

I can’t imagine a politician less suited to a movement of white working-class populist nativists than a business-class son of Indian immigrants educated at Harvard and Yale. Vance, another Yalie, at least had sob stories of hillbilly anomie to buy him some “real America” cred amid his stops in New Haven and Silicon Valley. Ramaswamy has none of that. To prove to the MAGA base that he was “one of us” when he ran for president in 2023, he resorted to flamboyant demagoguery.

 

And now, as his fledgling political career hangs by a thread, he’s done it again.

 

Doubling down.

 

On Tuesday night, Ramaswamy’s campaign admitted that it was behind a new ad featuring his opponent’s mother.

 

Democratic nominee Amy Acton is the daughter of Donna Arthur, who addresses the camera directly in the clip. “Amy has a serious problem,” Arthur warns the viewer. “She is a liar. She lies about her past. ……. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help. And she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”

 

When the ad began circulating online on Monday evening, it lacked the typical disclaimer at the end identifying the outfit that had produced it. Pressed about it on Tuesday afternoon, Team Vivek remained coy about its provenance—but endorsed its message. “We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020,” a spokeswoman said in a statement, “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.”

 

“What happened between Amy and her mother” is a matter of public record.

 

In 2019, Acton told an Ohio newspaper that her stepfather, Donna Arthur’s husband Cledith, had sexually abused her between the ages of 9 and 12. That was no late-in-life revelation, though: Acton had come forward about the abuse in 1978 with support from her father and testified against Cledith Arthur before a grand jury, leading to his indictment. He fled to avoid being arrested.

 

And Donna Arthur fled with him, abandoning her children. She “has her own criminal history,” former Dispatcher Charles Hilu noted yesterday at National Review, “including pleading guilty to theft by deception while living in Pennsylvania in the 1990s and being accused of animal abuse as recently as 2021.” That’s the type of character whom the ad is asking Ohio voters to trust in a test of credibility with Acton, a physician who was Ohio’s Department of Health director during the COVID-19 pandemic. Acton hasn’t so much as spoken to her mother, she claims, in nearly 50 years.

 

By yesterday evening, as the details of why mother and daughter are estranged began to spread and the uproar grew, media scrutiny finally forced Ramaswamy to come clean about the ad’s origin. “It is an ad from our campaign,” he told reporters, “and the thing that I want to say is that I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans, and unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues. She won’t debate me.”

 

I care about the issues, the candidate said … while handing a megaphone to a possible accomplice to child molestation to smear the victim, her own daughter, as a liar. Somehow, in an election cycle teeming with partisan attacks involving child sex abuse, this isn’t the first Ramaswamy ad to approvingly feature someone who’s tangled up in sexual offenses against a minor.

 

Within hours, Acton’s campaign had released its own ad in which her brother attested to the abuse the two had endured. “Shame on Vivek,” he went on to say. “He’s not fit to lead.” The backlash against Ramaswamy was so ferocious that it seeped across party lines, causing even some normally dependable Republican mouthpieces to denounce it. It seemed inevitable that he would pull the ad back, possibly with an apology.

 

He did not. He doubled down. Per Axios, Team Vivek is planning to plow $4 million into promoting the Donna Arthur ad. “This is a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton. The people who know her best keep warning Ohioans about her,” Ramaswamy’s campaign manager crowed to the outlet. Sources close to his operation told Axios that the spot “tested well” with persuadable voters.

 

I can believe that—provided that those persuadable voters knew nothing of the history between Acton and Arthur. A mother urging voters not to trust her daughter is powerful character testimony … until that mother turns out to have taken sides with a pedophile who allegedly preyed upon that daughter as a child, at which point her testimony begins to smell distinctly different.

 

Given how much media buzz and outraged criticism the ad has generated, I’m guessing most persuadable Ohio voters will learn the nature of the estrangement between Arthur and Acton before Election Day. And if they do, Ramaswamy, not his opponent, will be the candidate whom they find despicable.

 

Which leaves us with a mystery: Why? Why did he and his advisers think this ad would work to their advantage?

 

Trial balloon.

 

I suspect this was a trial balloon that got away from them.

 

It makes no sense to drop a bomb like the Arthur ad on Acton two weeks before the election. That gives her, and the press, far too much time to educate voters about what happened to her and what sort of person her mother is. For the ad to have worked to Ramswamy’s benefit, it should have been released 48 hours or so before the polls opened, leaving little time for a rebuttal.

 

Which was likely the plan.

 

The key detail on how the ad ended up online this week comes from a CNN report. “The video was first published on Monday night by an Ohio political blogger, D.J. Byrnes,” the network noted. “Byrnes told CNN he obtained the video from a voter who saw it as part of a poll and recorded it.” The existence of a poll was confirmed by another reporter, who got hold of a copy.

 

It sounds like Team Vivek was quietly testing how voters might react to the spot, not intending for it to surface as soon as it did. (That’s why it lacked the standard identifying information at the end, presumably.) Whoever recorded it and released it turned what was supposed to be a November surprise into an October one, effectively spoiling it.

 

The fact that Acton’s campaign was up with a rebuttal ad so quickly suggests they had an inkling of what was coming, possibly because they got wind of the poll while it was in the field—although it’s also possible that they simply expected Ramaswamy, being Ramaswamy, to eventually drag Acton’s abuse into the race somehow. “He’s a bad guy,” his old rival, Nikki Haley, said yesterday of the ad. A bad guy will inevitably do bad-guy things, as our friends in Ukraine are now discovering.

 

The interesting—and reprehensible—part in all this is how Ramaswamy responded when his trial balloon burst. Once the ad went public, he had a choice. Should he disavow it, blaming some overzealous staffer for producing it and insisting that it never would have seen the light of day had it not leaked? Or should he lean into it despite the obvious risk of a backlash?

 

In the end, he defaulted to the most basic rule of right-wing postliberalism. When in doubt, err on the side of ruthlessness.

 

Once the ad leaked, a backlash among Ohio’s centrist voters became a fait accompli. Disavowing the spot as the work of a renegade deputy would have done little for Ramaswamy, as appalled swing voters either wouldn’t have believed his claims of innocence or would have blamed him regardless for buck-stops-here reasons. Many (including me) would have suspected a dirty trick: Of course a weasel like Ramaswamy would cook up a vicious attack on his opponent and then try to have it both ways, feigning ignorance even as his allies circulated it widely online.

 

With the genie out of the bottle, Team Vivek was forced to do damage control. And in a mostly red state, with the left and its media allies baying for his blood, and with Ramaswamy already burdened by suspicions among the Republican base that he’s not “one of us,” the best way to minimize the political damage was to impress that base by doing what Trump would do. Be ruthless. Never apologize. Double down.

 

That’s what Max Miller did when he refused to quit his House race earlier this year despite the ugly headlines about his behavior toward Bernie Moreno’s daughter, granddaughter, and other women. Donald Trump didn’t quit after the Access Hollywood episode, did he? The president is a “fighter,” and so Miller would be a fighter too.

 

That’s also what J.D. Vance did earlier today when he was asked about Ramaswamy’s attack on Acton. “Politics is a tough business,” he told reporters, “and my message to my fellow elected Republicans is: If you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.” A Democrat got her feelings hurt because Vivek tried to weaponize her childhood sexual trauma against her? Boo hoo.

 

Not every Republican from Ohio is sleazy, but all of the sleaziest Republicans (not named “Ken Paxton,” anyway) are from Ohio.

 

The president’s son and namesake eagerly promoted Ramaswamy’s ad on Tuesday when it leaked online, not surprisingly. And when Trump himself is asked about it, I assume he’ll land somewhere between credulity and enthusiasm about Donna Arthur’s testimony. Vice-signaling is the way postliberal sociopaths demonstrate their commitment to winning to each other; Vivek, being a smart guy, understood that when he chose to embrace the ad on Tuesday night, just as he understood it in 2023 when he set out to distinguish himself as the most “based” demagogue on the Republican debate stage.

 

He’s cutthroat enough to be a leader in this party, you see. He doesn’t tremble before media disapproval. He’s a fighter. He’s “one of us.”

 

All in.

 

Look at it this way. At this point in the campaign, what does he have to lose by putting all of his chips on ruthlessness?

 

He trails Acton by 3.9 points in the RealClearPolitics average. If he comes up short in this race by any margin, his political ambitions are finished. Even in a national environment as dismal for Republicans as this one, losing a state that the president won by 11 points two years ago will be unspinnable.

 

A more likable politician might survive a defeat and get a second chance from his party in some statewide race down the line, but Ramaswamy is not that politician. And the GOP, which is likely to become more hostile to Indian Americans over time, is not that party.

 

If he loses next month by 8 points because angry voters disgusted by his attack on Acton wanted to punish him, he’s done. But if he loses by 1 point because voters turned out not to care about the ad, he’s still done. So why not air it? Either way, in the quite plausible event that his party underperforms across the ballot, Ramaswamy is destined to end up as a scapegoat for many Republicans looking to blame someone other than you-know-who for having dragged down the ticket.

 

The only unforgivable sin in Donald Trump’s movement is weakening the party’s hold on power. Ramaswamy won’t be able to atone for that sin if he loses.

 

But if he wins—and one should never count out a Trump-endorsed candidate in Ohio—then the Donna Arthur ad might be a career-maker for him.

 

It’ll be his Access Hollywood moment. He went nuclear on his opponent, was savaged by the left for it, stood his ground, and prevailed. In fact, not only did he go nuclear, he went nuclear when he was behind in the race and turned a likely defeat into an unexpected victory. In so doing, he’ll have confirmed postliberalism’s central thesis—that the key to political success is unabashed ruthlessness. His “based” fellow travelers will be grateful to him for it.

 

As of Tuesday night, Ramaswamy is all in on Donna Arthur and all in on that thesis. We’ll know in two weeks whether American politics is rid of him or not.