The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s latest science experiment in weaponized shamelessness, has finally let his Ohio TV ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother age off the air — you know, the one where mom shows up to call her daughter a liar about a childhood that included her stepfather being charged with raping her. The spot never mentions the rape case, because why deal with facts when you can just weaponize family trauma at 30 frames per second?

The campaign insists the ad simply "ran to completion," like this was a normal, healthy use of $4 million in airtime and not a televised emotional hostage situation. Even Mike DeWine — a Republican who endorsed Ramaswamy — begged him to take it down, which tells you how radioactive it was: when Mike "Shut the state down, but gently" DeWine thinks you’ve crossed a line, you’ve sprinted past it, set it on fire, and sold merch.

Acton, learning new details about her own childhood from a GOP attack ad like it’s a true-crime special, called it "despicable" and is getting an outpouring of support from Ohioans who apparently did not realize the governor’s race included a live demonstration of how thoroughly Trumpism has turned politics into a family-destruction sport. Ramaswamy, naturally, pulled the ad in the sneakiest way possible — no apology, no acknowledgment, just a shrug and four new spots. The cruelty was the point; the cowardice is the brand.

Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has decided that health care, schools, and roads are boring, so he’s dropping $4 million on an ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother — the woman who stayed married to the man charged with raping Acton when she was a child — to call her daughter a liar on television. Acton says the last time she saw her mother was when her stepfather was charged with raping her; he fled, Mom took his side, and now Mom is back for one last appearance: as paid opposition research with a hair and makeup budget.

Once the ad started circulating without a disclaimer like a political snuff film, Ramaswamy finally admitted it was his. He then claimed he really wants to talk about “substantive issues,” which is an interesting line for a guy whose closing argument is, "What if we platform the woman who defended the alleged child rapist?" Vice President JD Vance rushed out to defend him, scolding Republicans who were more disturbed by the ad than by Democrats existing, and praising Vivek for having the “audacity” to call a rape survivor a liar on TV. Bold stance from the author of Hillbilly Elegy: now auditioning for Stepdad Apologist Weekly.

Acton’s brother dropped a statement that reads like the script of a Lifetime movie the network would reject as too bleak: after the stepfather was arrested and the kids removed, their mother stayed married to Amy’s alleged rapist until he died. He calls Ramaswamy’s stunt “despicable,” which is generous, considering this is the second time Vivek’s campaign has had to quietly edit out a man with a history of sexually exploiting minors from one of their ads. The last time, it was an Ohio farmer’s husband who’d been convicted of molesting his nieces. Apparently vetting for the Ohio GOP is just: “Can you say ‘Democrats bad’ into a camera? Great, don’t tell us what you did to children.”

So the party of “protect the children” has arrived at its logical endpoint: elevating an abusive parent to smear a survivor, shrugging off the details as long as it polls well in the exurbs, and calling everyone else “obsessed” for noticing. Family values, 2026 edition: believe the accused, attack the victim, and hope voters are too numb to care.

Donald Trump, the man who proudly declared “I won on groceries”, has discovered that it’s a lot easier to yell at Safeway in a campaign rally than to keep prices down when your foreign policy helps light the Middle East on fire and diesel shoots up with it. With the Iran war jacking up fuel and shipping costs, food prices are still rising, and the grand populist promise of cheap everyday essentials has boiled down to: congratulations, you now win the right to pay 3.7% more for your apples.

The New York Times went to four key Senate battleground states and found Trump 2024 voters doing the new American ritual: staring at their grocery receipts like crime scenes and wondering whether the guy who said he’d make life affordable maybe just…didn’t. Some are openly questioning their vote; others are gritting their teeth and backing him anyway, because nothing says “accountability” like being furious about prices while still leaning Republican down-ballot. A White House spokesman insists Trump has a “strong pro-growth agenda,” which is technically true if you’re only measuring the growth of your grocery bill.

One voter, refugee-turned-business-owner Jessy Hakizimana, sums it up with brutal efficiency: “I don’t think he has lowered prices for anything.” He’s now clipping coupons for school-lunch sandwich meat while debating whether to keep voting for the same party that helped deliver this little economic miracle. It’s the classic Trump-era bargain: you get the tough talk, the culture-war sugar high, and then discover the only thing that’s actually cheaper is the quality of governance.

Republicans spent 2024 declaring they had cracked the code on Latino voters: just shout "¡Viva Trump!" over the sound of ICE raids and everything would sort itself out. Two years later, NBC finds Latino voters giving Democrats a 24-point edge on who should control Congress, a 21-point advantage on the economy, and a giant middle finger to Trump’s deportation state. The big strategic insight from the GOP appears to have been, "What if we gerrymander a bunch of heavily Latino districts in Texas and Florida and just assume nobody will notice when we terrorize their families?" Shockingly, people noticed.

Trump is underwater with Latino voters on the cost of living (78% disapprove), the economy (74%), immigration (69%), and foreign policy (68%). Even on his alleged signature issue, border security, he’s still losing 58%-39%. Voters describe his deportation policies as "brutal" and "cold," with two-thirds saying enforcement has gone too far, while poll respondents casually mention friends and relatives being deported to the wrong country because this administration runs immigration like a drunk airline.

Meanwhile, Latino voters are carrying IDs everywhere out of fear of ICE, know people detained or deported in the last two years, and some are considering leaving the U.S. or skipping in-person voting because of enforcement fears — a chilling little side effect of Trump’s governance-by-intimidation. Republicans dreamed of a durable Latino realignment; what they got instead is a case study in what happens when you confuse "swing voters" with "people you can endlessly harass and they’ll still thank you for it."