Vivek Ramaswamy’s Amy Acton ad makes a false – and sickening – argument

I’ve heard people say that the Ramaswamy team must have been scared.Last week, the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech billionaire and onetime Republican presidential candidate who is currently the Republican nominee to be the governor of Ohio, ran an ad featuring the long-estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, the physician and former public health official Amy Acton.In the clip, Acton’s aging mother emphasizes that her daughter is dishonest. She refers to what she calls a pattern of lying. She urges Ohioans to not vote for her daughter.The clip was meant to leave a dramatic impression on voters with the drama of its severed family bond: how dramatic must Acton’s dishonesty be, viewers were supposed to wonder, if even her own mother is disturbed by it? Left unsaid in the ad is why Acton and her mother are estranged, or much of what Acton’s mother believes she lies about.According to both of them, Acton and her mother have not spoken in nearly 50 years, since they last saw each other in court. Acton’s mother was there to support her husband on charges of raping and sexually abusing the child Acton from the ages of nine to 12. Shortly after their final meeting, the man was released on bond; he and Acton’s mother fled the state; he evaded justice, and remained married to Acton’s mother, until his death in 2004.When the old woman says that her daughter was a liar, this is what she apparently means: she is accusing her of lying about sexual abuse, and siding with her dead husband, the alleged abuser.Analysts say that the Ramaswamy campaign must have reached for this attack out of desperation, afraid of what they were seeing in internal polls. But it is hard to imagine any fear that could justify it. Decent people would rather lose an election if doing such a thing is what it takes to win. What the ad reflects is not a desperate tactic, but a depraved character.In the days since the ad was released, amid widespread condemnation, Ramaswamy has doubled down on the decision to attack his opponent for the sexual abuse that she suffered as a child.“Politics is a tough sport. You point out where you think your opponents are flawed,” he said. He said that Acton had no vision at all, “other than to complain about what someone else did to her”. That it was Ramaswamy, and not Acton, who made her childhood abuse an issue in the race seemed lost on him.Ramaswamy was soon joined in his defense of the ad by vice-president and 2028 hopeful JD Vance, who said: “The media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because, guess what? Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”Soon, the president himself joined in. “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,” he wrote on Truth Social, his proprietary social media platform.Trump responded to calls for Ramaswamy to take the ad down. “I suggested, on the other hand, that Vivek should keep it up, and let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate.”There’s enough horror in the brute decision to smear Acton with the shame and condemnation that rightly belongs to a pedophile that it can be difficult to stomach any close reading of such statements.But I think it is illustrative to try. Because in their statements defending and supporting the ad, the likes of Ramaswamy, Vance and Trump have made distinct claims – common, but contradictory – about the episode from Acton’s childhood, and about what sexual abuse means.The litany of smears allege that Acton is “complaining” about child rape, but also that she’s lying about it; they say both that she’s dishonest, but also that she’s “flawed” and “defective”.The claims seem to suggest two accusations that can’t both be true: both that Acton was fabricating her allegations, and was never sexually abused by her stepfather, and also that the abuse was so damaging to her psychologically that it has made her unfit for power.Which is it? Did it not happen, and the little girl lied, or did it in fact happen, and the little girl now can’t be a competent woman?No one is asking Vivek Ramaswamy this, and I would like to. But I suspect he does not have an answer.His real allegation is not that Acton wasn’t abused, or that she was too damaged by the abuse to govern. His real allegation is that by being the type of person who rape happens to, Acton – and, by extension, many of the rest of us – are foreclosed from worthiness for authority.His real allegation is that the world should be divided into two types of people: the domineering and the dominated; the kind who wield power, and the kind power is wielded against.Ramaswamy thinks of himself as belonging in the former category. Acton’s stepfather probably thought of himself that way, too.The maximal horror of child sexual abuse – including the kind that Acton suffered, which is classified by experts like the Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman as a form of incest – can tend to obscure how tragically common it is.We like to imagine that such horrific things don’t happen very often; sadly, that is not the case. There are many adults who, as children, suffered as Acton suffered. You likely know some.Many of them, like Acton, have built lives of meaning, honor, and achievement; they are loved by friends, of service to their communities, driven by interests and passions that often have very little to do with what they endured. The abhorrence of the abuse they experienced is not the sum total of their characters.This, too, is common, though it is no less extraordinary: that many women live through the worst kinds of sexual violence, and go on to grasp their own dignity back from among the wreckage that it leaves. Even in the face of adversity and injustice, they persist in their self-respect.It is a profound form of moral effort. And it is something that Vivek Ramaswamy wouldn’t know anything about. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist