I have been watching political advertising for most of my adult life, and I have seen some truly vile garbage. Willie Horton. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Every grainy, ominous voiceover that ever tried to convince a suburban mom that the Democrat down the street was coming for her children. I thought I had seen the absolute bottom of American political advertising. Then Vivek Ramaswamy showed up in Ohio with a shovel, a television budget, and the moral judgment of a sewer rat.
What Ramaswamy put on Ohio television this month was worse than both. Those were disgusting exercises in racial fearmongering and character assassination. Ramaswamy somehow found a way to make them look restrained. His ad features Amy Acton’s own mother calling her daughter a liar. Yes, her own mother. The same woman Acton has said sided with her stepfather after he sexually assaulted her when she was 12. The same mother whose children were removed from her custody, after the stepfather was indicted for raping Acton. Ramaswamy looked at one of the most traumatic chapters of a woman’s childhood and decided the person to put in front of a camera was the mother who had failed to protect her.
I have seen politicians exploit tragedy, manufacture scandals, and drag innocent people through the mud to win elections. But weaponizing a woman’s childhood sexual abuse against her, using her own mother as the delivery system, requires a particularly revolting level of moral bankruptcy. What kind of sick bastard sits through a campaign strategy meeting, hears this proposal, and says, “Excellent. Let’s spend $4 million making sure every television viewer in Ohio sees it”? I would love to know who pitched this abomination, who approved it, and how many people in that room managed to get through the meeting without developing even a mild case of human decency.
Ohio Republicans knew immediately what they were looking at. One strategist told TIME, “We’ve lost the plot.” Another went further: “We now deserve to lose this race.” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling” and urged Ramaswamy to pull it. Think about how spectacularly disgusting your campaign has to become before members of your own party start publicly arguing that you deserve to lose. These are Republicans. Their tolerance for political indecency has been tested, stretched, and expanded for more than a decade. Vivek somehow managed to find the emergency exit at the bottom of their moral basement and keep digging.
But Donald Trump, a man whose relationship with basic human decency has been estranged longer than most Hollywood marriages, thought the ad was “hitting pay dirt.” Of course he did. Trump has spent his political career treating other people’s suffering as either a punchline or a campaign opportunity. Give him a story about a woman surviving childhood sexual abuse, and his first instinct is to check whether the polling numbers are moving. This is a man who could watch somebody fall down a flight of stairs and ask whether the footage would work in a thirty-second spot.
And then there was JD Vance, the vice president of the United States and a man who has apparently dedicated his adult life to proving that having a Yale Law degree does not prevent someone from becoming a spectacular dumbass. Vance scolded Republicans for “whining” about the ad. Whining! A political party is exploiting a woman’s childhood sexual assault, and this sanctimonious little fraud thinks the problem is that people have the audacity to object.
Remember, Vance built his public identity around a memoir about childhood instability, family dysfunction, and the struggles of growing up in a troubled household. He became famous telling America how difficult his childhood was. But when another person discusses her childhood trauma, suddenly it’s campaign ammunition, and anybody who objects is a whiner. Imagine writing Hillbilly Elegy, cashing the checks, accepting the sympathy, and then helping another politician turn a woman’s abuse into a television commercial. If hypocrisy were a competitive sport, Vance would be standing on the Olympic podium complaining that the gold medal wasn’t shiny enough.
And the Republican desperation is what makes this even more pathetic. Republicans have controlled Ohio’s governorship for years. They have the machinery, the donors, the institutional advantages, and a president who cannot resist inserting himself into every election within shouting distance. Yet here they are, so terrified of Amy Acton that their grand electoral strategy involves digging through her childhood trauma and recruiting her mother to do the dirty work. You would think a party that never stops talking about family values might recognize the obscenity of that arrangement. Evidently, family values are suspended whenever the family member can be useful in a negative advertisement.
When the president and vice president of the United States look at a woman’s childhood sexual assault and see a messaging opportunity, you have located the floor, and these three assholes have arrived with industrial excavation equipment.
And then, with the Republican wound still wide open, Barack Obama flew into Cleveland and poured a whole shaker of salt in it.
Obama did exactly what he should have done. He said fuck it, the gloves are off, let’s dance. In his first Ohio visit since 2018, in front of thousands of people packed into Cleveland’s Public Auditorium, he named names, named offenses, and gave Democrats the jolt they have been waiting on for two years. This was Ohio, a state Trump has won three times, a state where Democratic candidates have spent years running from their own party like it owed them money. In 2024, Ohio didn’t get a single presidential campaign visit. On Saturday, the last Democrat to carry the state stood next to Acton and Sherrod Brown and swung at everybody.
He started with Ramaswamy. “In recent days, we’ve seen there is no line he will not cross, no low he will not sink to,” Obama said. “There’s a decency that we should expect out of our public officials, and I don’t know what’s happened where the standards of behavior have gotten so low that somebody could run an ad like that.” He said Acton has spoken movingly about the abuse, neglect, and homelessness she survived, which is a sentence that should never need saying at a political rally, and yet here we are. A former president has to remind a Republican gubernatorial nominee that exploiting childhood sexual assault is unacceptable. We have reached the point where political campaigns need the kind of basic behavioral instructions normally posted on kindergarten classroom walls.
Then he turned to Ramaswamy and Sen. Jon Husted together, two men who have kept Trump out of their campaign commercials while showing up at every single one of his Ohio visits. “They’re acting like they never heard of him,” Obama said. “‘Donald who?’”
And that is where this becomes genuinely hilarious. For years, these people treated a Trump endorsement like a sacred religious artifact. They practically needed smelling salts whenever he mentioned their names at a rally. Now the same politicians are trying to hide him from their television commercials like an embarrassing relative who has shown up drunk at Thanksgiving dinner. They still want his voters, his fundraising machinery, and his blessing. They just don’t want the rest of Ohio remembering whose ass they’ve been kissing for the last decade. Vivek spent years auditioning for the role of Trump’s favorite intellectual lapdog, and now he’s trying to convince voters he barely knows the man. Buddy, we’ve seen the tapes. You weren’t standing next to Trump by accident. You practically had a reserved parking space in his colon.
And then Obama went to work on the president himself. He blamed Trump for starting “an unnecessary war that nobody asked for” in Iran, a war that has pushed diesel to record prices and regular gas above $4 a gallon. He said plainly that this administration’s actions are directly responsible for rising costs. He hit the tariffs and the Medicaid cuts. He said the country is not stuck with “a spineless Congress and Republican governors who are enabling lawlessness and carelessness and cruelty and indifference for working people.” He told Ohio that after two years of “chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence,” voters finally get the chance to say “enough is enough.”
And because he is still the funniest man to ever hold the office, he described Trump’s White House renovations as making the place look “like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory.” That is a devastating description of Trump’s interior decorating philosophy. The man approaches public architecture the same way he approaches foreign policy: throw enough money and gold at the problem, ignore everybody who knows what they’re doing, and announce that the result is the greatest achievement in human civilization. Somewhere, a perfectly innocent chandelier is begging for asylum.
So how did Ohio Republicans respond to a former president standing in their biggest city and indicting their entire ticket by name?
They brought up a website.
I am not making this up. Barack Obama came to Ohio and accused their candidates of moral cowardice, their president of incompetence, and their party of enabling cruelty. Their response was to reach into the political archives, blow the dust off an old folder, and announce that HealthCare.gov had technical problems in 2013.
Ramaswamy spokesperson Connie Luck went all the way back to the launch of the Affordable Care Act website. “Seniors paid for that mess with cuts to their Medicare,” she said, adding that Ohio can’t afford a governor “who shows up for Obama but never shows up for them.”
That is their comeback. A loading screen from Obama’s second term. Somewhere in the Ramaswamy campaign office, a 24-year-old opposition researcher is still trying to find Obama’s tan suit on a thumb drive. Somebody else is probably preparing a devastating exposé about Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden. At this rate, their October surprise will be discovering that Obama once wore mom jeans while riding a bicycle.
Think about what that says. Republicans have the White House, control Congress, and have spent two years telling Americans how wonderful everything is under Donald Trump. Obama comes to town, asks them to defend their record, and suddenly they’re conducting a forensic investigation into ancient internet history. These people have access to the most powerful political apparatus in the country, and their best counterattack sounds like a disgruntled customer complaining that Windows Vista ruined his afternoon.
And the funniest part is that they genuinely seem to believe this is a winning strategy. Gas prices are up, voters are angry, their gubernatorial nominee has managed to disgust members of his own party, and the former president they spent years demonizing is filling auditoriums in their backyard. Their answer? A trip down memory lane.
If Barack Obama sneezed at a campaign rally, these fools would issue a press release blaming him for the 2009 swine flu outbreak. They have spent so many years recycling the same attacks that their opposition research department might as well be staffed by archaeologists. Obama is campaigning in 2026, and Republicans are still fighting the 2012 election.
At some point, somebody in that party might want to inform the rest of them that Barack Obama is no longer president. Unfortunately for Republicans, he is still considerably better at campaigning than the people who are.
Husted’s spokeswoman, Amy Natoce, said the sight of Brown and Obama together “should send shivers down Ohioans’ spines,” then blamed the duo for “higher taxes, less jobs and wide-open borders.” Fewer jobs, Amy. And Ohio’s only international border sits in the middle of Lake Erie, so unless the Canadians are paddling over in canoes to steal your Skyline Chili, I’m not sure which border you’re worried about. The Ramaswamy campaign also issued a statement calling Obama “a former president flown in to try to distract from the failures of the far-left.” Distract from what, exactly? The only thing anybody in Ohio has talked about all week is your candidate’s ad. Your campaign started a dumpster fire, poured gasoline on it, and now wants to know why everybody is staring at the flames.
My favorite came from Jay Edwards, the Republican running for state treasurer, who stood at a GOP bus tour stop and blamed the media for the party’s civil war over the ad. “They’re trying to tear the Republican Party apart,” he said. Jay, you idiot, Republicans are the ones who thought it was a good idea to give that disgusting ad to the media in the first place! Your gubernatorial nominee’s campaign produced it, approved it, and put it on television. What the hell did you think television stations were going to do with it, Jay? Hide it under a mattress? The media didn’t break into Ramaswamy’s campaign headquarters, steal a videotape, and broadcast it against his will.
And now you’re blaming the media because people watched the very advertisement your party wanted them to watch? That is an extraordinary level of stupidity, even by contemporary Republican standards. If the Republican Party is being torn apart by this commercial, perhaps somebody should have told Vivek to stop shopping for dynamite. You cannot spend $4 million begging people to pay attention to something and then accuse the press of a conspiracy when people actually pay attention.
Notice what none of these people did. Not one of them answered a single thing Obama said. Nobody defended the ad on decency grounds. Nobody explained the gas prices. Nobody denied the war. When you have nothing of substance to say, you reach for the same weak-ass, tired tricks you’ve been pulling out of the drawer since 2009…
