Ohio Venues Keep Cancelling on Vivek Ramasamy After That Campaign Ad

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is struggling to book venues in his home state just days before the midterms, amid growing backlash to his unreasonably cruel attack ad against Democratic opponent Amy Acton.Two Ohio restaurants—Elliot’s Wood Fired Kitchen and The Old Dog Ale House & Brewery—have canceled events with the Ohio Republican Party featuring Ramaswamy after he released and then doubled down on his advert featuring Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur. An event the party was supposed to host on Tuesday now lists “to be announced” as the location.The ad features Arthur accusing her daughter of lying about how she was raised. But Arthur lost custody of Acton after her husband, Cledith “Bud” Arthur, was arrested for raping Acton when she was just 12 years old. Bud skipped bail and left town with Acton’s mother, who stayed married to him until his death. Now she is being platformed by Ramaswamy, calling her daughter who survived years of sexual abuse a liar on camera.That cruelty is negatively impacting Ramaswamy’s campaign. An anonymous Ohio Republican even told Zeteo that they were “getting calls that people don’t want him there.” Other venues that hosted Ramaswamy over the weekend have been flooded by one-star reviews on Google.Aside from the restaurants, Ramaswamy has been rebuked by every living governor of Ohio, Democrat and Republican, for the ad—which has continued to run. Former Republican Governor Mike DeWine said that it was “wrong” to run the ad last week and urged the Ramaswamy campaign to take it down.Even still, Ramaswamy, President Trump, and Vice President JD Vance have continued to defend the decision to run the ad, while Acton’s brother Philip Stearns lambasted the campaign last week.“It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Stearns said. “After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died. This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core—a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.” Vivek Ramaswamy’s dirty political schemes are making history.The Ohio Republican gubernatorial nominee’s boorish ad campaign against Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton has inspired one of Ohio’s oldest newspapers, Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer, to break company policy in Acton’s favor.The paper had stated a few months ago it would not make political endorsements, including in the governor’s race. But on Sunday, its editorial board published a statement declaring it stood firmly behind Acton.The weekly’s decision is just the latest in a tsunami of public backlash against Ramaswamy and his team after they aired an advertisement earlier this month that featured Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur. In the ad, Arthur claimed that “Amy has a serious problem.” The MAGA Republicans arranged the cameo despite the fact that Acton had not spoken to her mother since she was 12 years old, and that Arthur abandoned her two children to skip town with her husband, who was indicted for allegedly raping Acton when she was a young girl.“A candidate who uses childhood sexual abuse as a weapon against the person who endured it has crossed a line that Ohioans should defend, whatever their party,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote.“We are better than this. We have a responsibility to show it,” it continued. “We made our endorsement policy to serve our readers. We cannot let it become a reason to remain silent when we believe Ohio faces a choice this consequential.”Dozens of Republicans—including Ohio Governor Mike DeWine—have since come out against Ramaswamy’s tasteless ad, advising the former Trump official to take it down.Nonetheless, Ramaswamy has repeatedly defended the ad. On Friday, he told the Ohio Capital Journal that the message had “nothing to do with childhood abuse, sexual abuse.”“Our ad was about a consistent track record of Amy Acton telling lies, including during this campaign,” Ramaswamy said.But the voting public has not seen it that way. Protesters have begun to appear outside of Ramaswamy’s speaking engagements. At a campaign event in Strongsville last week, demonstrators held up signs that likened Ramaswamy to a snake: “Nobody slithers lower than Vivek #VileAds,” read one posterboard recorded by the Journal. Others said Ramaswamy “defends child predators,” protects “pedos,” and “exploits child abuse for votes.”The negative rhetoric has begun to materialize in damaging ways for the biotech billionaire. Several Ohio venues canceled Ramaswamy’s speaking events over the weekend, apparently concerned about the fallout should they be affiliated with his drowning reputation.Read more about Ramaswamy:A new rape allegation has been leveled against President Trump in a report released by House Democrats Monday detailing the White House’s cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein files.Beatrice Keul, a model and former Miss Switzerland, told Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that Trump violently raped her in a hotel room at his Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1993, when she was 24 years old.According to the Democrats’ report, Keul said Trump grabbed her from behind and raped her, which she described as “brutal.” He allegedly tore her dress, bruised her in multiple places, and caused her to bleed. Afterward, she said he sat her on the edge of the bed, repeated promises he had made earlier that his associate, modeling agent Paolo Zampolli, would help her with a U.S. visa and admission to New York University, and made her promise to keep quiet. (Zampolli would later hold roles in both Trump administrations.)“The show must go on,” Trump allegedly told her. Months later, he reached out to her and again promised to help her get a visa and go to NYU, but she declined assistance, according to the report.Previously, the Swiss model told the Daily Mail in 2024 that Trump only attempted to assault her, jumping on top of her and groping her. In that account, she said he backed off after she resisted. “I tried everything I could. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s talk first’ or something like that, then he slowed down,” Keul said in that interview. The Democrats’ report does not mention why Keul decided to change her story.The report states that the assault happened while Keul was in the U.S. for Trump’s American Dream Pageant for 16- to 22-year-olds, and that he introduced himself to her at a press luncheon for the event, where she also met Epstein. The billionaire financier introduced himself as “Jeffrey, Don’s best friend,” spending 10 minutes talking to her while grinning sideways at Trump, who was watching them talk from afar, according to the report. Keul alleges that Epstein also made promises to her, saying, “You know I can take care of you. We organize many parties with Don.”“Flights, accommodations, you don’t have to worry about anything,” Epstein said per the report.The report states that Trump’s promise of NYU admission is part of a pattern of Epstein promising an NYU education to “lure in and then control his victims,” and that Keul would have no way of knowing this when she mentioned Trump’s offer to the Daily Mail in 2024, months before Epstein’s NYU offers were revealed in later public reports.The incident also fits with Epstein’s usual practices, as he often called foreign pageant winners and invited them to visit him in Florida, according to the report. An unnamed assistant to Epstein in the 1990s has reportedly said that “on dozens of occasions in the mid-1990s, the financier instructed her to call a pageant winner from somewhere in the world and invite her to visit him in Florida.”The White House has denied the allegations, with spokesperson Lauren Bis telling HuffPost in an email, “This ‘report’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans from the surging Republican momentum driven by President Trump’s historic achievements. The President kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club at Mar-a-Lago because he was a creep, and he has been fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein.” It’s no surprise that President Donald Trump thinks that the oil and gas business is more important than lowering gas prices: He’s the one making a fortune.A new report published Monday by the Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee revealed that the value of Trump’s personal holdings in oil and gas may have increased by 43 percent in the last 10 months alone. The president’s oil and gas holdings are currently worth between $22.5 million and $81.6 million. At the end of 2025, they were worth between $12.6 million and $46 million.The report came out shortly after the president started bragging about how the energy prices hurting Americans are making him and his billionaire buddies rich. “And while oil prices are temporarily high, and will be falling dramatically in a short period of time as soon as that war is over—because there’s so much oil,” he said to the crowd at a rally in Georgia on Saturday, referring to his war in Iran.“The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars.… Our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars ’cause of what’s happened in the Middle East … trillions of dollars.”Meanwhile, the average price Americans are paying for gasoline under Trump has officially surpassed the average price during the Biden administration. Trump has repeatedly pledged to end his seven-month “six-week war” with Iran and lower gasoline prices to below $2 per gallon. But what reason does he have to end the war and lower prices when he’s openly admitting it’s in his financial interest to let Americans suffer? And what kind of message does this send to Americans ahead of the midterm elections, where Trump wants voters to pretend his name is on the ballot?Read more about Trump’s opinion of gas prices:Elon Musk fessed to slowing down Ukraine’s Starlink connection, claiming that the war-torn country was in the wrong because it was using the company’s services in its war against Russia.“Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be,” Musk wrote in an X post Saturday. “Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week.”Musk had previously suggested that he was not responsible for the drop in Starlink’s satellite-supplied internet service over Ukraine last week, which occurred as Russian missiles barraged Kyiv. Instead, Musk blamed the lapse on the recent decisions of the U.S. military and Donald Trump.Trump refused to take the blame shortly afterward. “I don’t know who did it, but I was not involved,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House on Wednesday. Trump reportedly called Musk to demand he return service to the region that same day, according to The Wall Street Journal.Yet despite Musk’s renewed position, Ukraine’s actions early last week were anything but offensive. Russian ballistic missiles slammed two plants supplying heat and electricity to Kyiv and damaged a residential building in the capital city. At least nine people died in the attacks, Ukraine’s State Emergency Services shared in a Telegram statement.Ukrainian officials suggested that the strikes could have been prevented if they received the proper intelligence—but there was only radio silence. Multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News that U.S. officials claimed their defense systems had failed to detect the missiles because of “bad weather,” but Kyiv did not buy the excuse.The intelligence blunder occurred days after Trump brokered an eyebrow-raising deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Moscow, effectively offering the country an economic lifeline that would allow Russia to continue the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was publicly critical of the arrangement, sparking a multiday harassment campaign in which the Trump administration called Kyiv and other European capitals, threatening to cut off military intelligence sharing and weapons deliveries unless Ukraine stopped attacking Russian oil refineries.The White House’s influence over Starlink appears to be greater than the president lets on. Six former senior U.S. officials told Reuters Friday that both the Biden and Trump administrations had previously asked SpaceX to adjust its Starlink internet availability in different countries, including Ukraine and areas of the Middle East.Read more about Starlink: