Actions Speak. Listen Up.
On Wednesday, October 21, Vice President JD Vance said that he was “disgusted” by fellow Republican Party members who pushed back on a controversial ad produced by the team of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for the governor of Ohio.
The ad featured Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, who repeatedly calls Acton a liar and says that “she lies about her past.” Acton has not been in contact with her birth mother since 1978, when she and her younger brother were removed from Arthur’s custody after their stepfather was indicted for raping Acton when she was a child.
“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,” Vance said.
Humanity as a whole should be disgusted when we see people, regardless of political affiliation, caring more about what people want to do to the United States of America than what they are already doing to each other.
Ramaswamy’s team chose to make its attacks personal by using Donna Arthur in their advertisement. As far as spokespeople go, Arthur is not a good one. Her children were taken from her nearly fifty years ago due to neglect and abuse. Arthur does not have a relationship with Acton, and her personal knowledge of her daughter ended in 1978. Arthur’s statements carry the same level of credibility as those of a stranger.
The only logical conclusion for why Ramaswamy’s team chose to include Arthur at all is to cause harm to his opponent.
Perhaps his team knew that the advertisement would go viral. But we are far past the aphorism, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.” Every article and post about this ad campaign has been bad publicity—it shows that Ramaswamy’s team is a disrespectful bully with no regard for human dignity.
Ramaswamy is already denigrating his opponent by dredging up childhood trauma. If we are worried about what people want to do to the United States of America, we should consider how those who are currently operating by this moral code will impact the future of our country.
In addition to the ad being morally repugnant, it was also illegal. Every political advertisement must include a “paid for” disclosure. The ad was missing this information, which led to some speculation over who produced the ad. It wasn’t until late Tuesday, October 20, that Ramaswamy’s team took responsibility for it.
Even if we give Ramaswamy’s team the benefit of the doubt and assume they left off the disclosure by mistake, Vance is telling us to ignore incompetence. If your marketing and public relations team doesn’t understand rudimentary media laws, they should not be in their positions.
If we assume that Ramaswamy’s team intentionally hid their role in the ad, Vance is telling us to embrace criminal behavior and contempt for the law.
In either case, the behavior is inexcusable, and while many people may view this lack of disclosure as a minor issue, it’s a symptom of incompetence, contempt, or both.
Vance said that Republicans should not be “whining” about Ramaswamy’s ad campaign and that they should instead focus on “what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.” This implies we should excuse Ramaswamy’s abhorrent actions because they contribute to the greater purpose of preventing Democrats from winning the Ohio gubernatorial race and the Senate.
President Donald Trump also backed Ramaswamy on Thursday, October 22, and encouraged him to keep running the advertisement in order to “let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals!” There was no evidence of Acton’s uncontrollable lying, cheating, or stealing in the advertisement.
When the nation’s top political leaders ask their constituents to overlook cruelty and criminal behavior for the sake of a political party’s agenda, they are establishing a dangerous precedent: ethics are disposable if they interfere with a desired outcome.
Vance is asking us all to overlook an abhorrent, illegal act of weaponizing someone’s trauma for political gain. He is in direct opposition to his self-proclaimed Catholic beliefs—the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “an evil action cannot be justified by a reference to good intention.”
Trump is asking us to embrace this act.
What’s really disgusting is what Vivek Ramaswamy is doing to Amy Acton and the precedent he is setting for political advertising and party division. Our vice president wants us to worry about what the Democrats could do to our country, to focus on what might happen instead of what’s already happening.
If we are genuinely concerned about the future of the United States, we need to focus on what’s happening right now. On how we treat each other. On how we live out our values, even when it’s hard, even when our party is at risk of losing. If we don’t, there won’t be a future to be concerned with.
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