There is no floor to what the modern Republican Oarty will turn into a political attack. On Oct. 19, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign released an ad featuring the mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, challenging her daughter’s claims that her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, raped her in 1978. “She is a liar,” says Acton’s mother in the ad. “She lies about her past.”

Acton’s brother has confirmed her account in a statement put out by her campaign. The National Review has also reported on legal documents that provide extensive evidence of Acton’s abuse and the criminal charges against Arthur.

The ad immediately drew condemnation from Acton, Democrats and many Republicans. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said, “It’s wrong to run this ad,” and urged the Ramaswamy campaign to drop it. Former Republican Rep. Jim Renacci likewise urged fellow party members to distance themselves from the ad. Even Sen. Jon Husted, currently running for reelection against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, said he would not have run the ad.

But strong supporting evidence apparently isn’t enough to stop Ramaswamy from airing the ad — or his backers in the White House from weaponizing violence against children. Ramaswamy has been unrepentant about mocking his opponent’s past trauma, and plans to spend $4 million to run the ad on TV and the internet before the Nov. 3 election.

“It’s wrong to run this ad.”

In this, he has the full support of the president and the vice president.

“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” JD Vance said . Donald Trump , in a long post on Truth Social, wrote, “Vivek Ramaswamy put up a very powerful Ad about a mother saying that her daughter, Amy Acton, who is running for Governor of Ohio, is a liar, and much worse,” and that “anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in Office, let alone the Office of Governor.”

The Trump administration uses the treatment of women reporting childhood sexual abuse opportunistically, an act of political misogyny most famously reflected in its response to survivors of abuse by the president’s old pal, Jeffrey Epstein.

The administration continues to stonewall the complete release of the Epstein files and has directly insulted those who reported accounts of childhood abuse. In Defector , David Roth writes that the Acton ad is the handiwork of “a desperate, nasty candidate, doing desperate, nasty shit, but it is not just that.”

It is a tactical decision on the Ramaswamy campaign’s part to be as disgusting as possible — to make common cause with a woman who abandoned her children to live with the pedophile rapist who harmed her daughter — but it is also an ideological one, and a crystalline statement of what latter-day Trumpism is about, and who it is for.

Though the particulars are constantly being refreshed, the wellspring of this cruelty is not native to Trump’s second term. As Adam Serwer noted in the Atlantic in the weeks before Trump’s first midterm election nearly a decade ago, t he cruelty of MAGA has always been the point .

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