“Pay dirt,” Donald Trump said. Being savvy, he thought no further. A mother denounces her own daughter? Put that in an ad. What pitfall could there be? What possible complication? It’s perfectly straightforward: her mother, folks. Somebody right up close, the closest, and she says the lady’s no good. No gap there, no who-is-this-person. Her mother’s saying it—what could go wrong?
Vivek Ramaswamy thought much the same thing, and now we all know about Amy Acton’s mother. Acton’s the Democrat running for governor of Ohio, Ramaswamy’s the Republican, and Acton’s mother is the star of an ad prepared by the Ramaswamy campaign. In it she famously calls her daughter a liar and accuses the Democrat of lying “her entire life.” But the old lady, Donna Arthur, has been convicted twice of felony theft by deception. “Don’t vote for people who lie,” she tells us and all the while, etc. Nobody thought to check.
The daughter says that back when she was a child her stepfather molested her, and court documents show he was indicted for this crime. Acton’s mother said Acton never lived in a campsite growing up—the one specific claim mentioned in the ad—and the documents give a campsite address for where the stepfather was arrested. So now the ad’s been trimmed and the one specific claim has vanished. Court records also show that the mother lost custody because of the alleged molestation and that the stepfather skipped town. The mother followed him and decades later she’s a widow and lives in her car in a church parking lot. In 2021 she was up before a judge because two kittens died after they’d been locked in her vehicle (hot day, windows rolled up). After listening to her side of things, the court found Arthur “to be not credible.”
Acton’s mother accuses her of lying, Acton accuses her mother of neglect, and the available records all fall on Acton’s side. As Ramaswamy could’ve figured if he’d bothered to think at all. One person was running for governor, the other was denouncing their own child—who was more likely to be a flake?
Schmuck’s a word that takes on various meanings, and one is this: somebody who’s willing to go low but doesn’t have the brains to benefit from it. Trump and Ramaswamy reacted like schmucks. So did everyone on Ramaswamy’s staff who didn’t think some research was called for, so did Don Jr. and Michael Knowles and the other corrupt saps who talked up the accusations and then saw them go pop. “It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder,” a smart-aleck Frenchman said after Napoleon committed a misstep. What we have here is more of a spasm. Sheer appetite kicked in and the suckers went lunging for the fool’s gold.
Trump still hasn’t learned, even now that the facts have reared up to bite the GOP in the ass. “Pay dirt,” he tells the crowd, a smart operator talking like a pro. He shows a great ability to overlook and so does Ramaswamy. Morality, for example, since many people have expressed revulsion simply at using a mother against a daughter. But also facts, common sense, and so on. Trumpwamy didn’t think, it lunged. Below good and bad, below the level of functioning intelligence, we have the level where Trumpwamy makes up its mind.
—Follow C.T. May on X: @CTMay3