What JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy Don’t Get About Trump’s Success

Let’s just get this out of the way: The ad released on Tuesday by a super PAC connected to Ohio Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy (and later endorsed by the candidate himself) is the most despicable in American political history. It features the mother of Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar.

The ad’s effectiveness requires knowing nothing about Donna Arthur. She has not seen her daughter since 1978, when Acton and her brother were removed from Arthur’s custody after her husband—Acton’s stepfather—was indicted for raping Acton. Arthur left Ohio and stayed with the stepfather, who has since passed away. Acton’s allegations are credible, horrifying, and a key part of her appeal as a candidate who has known struggle. The ad, in context, is revolting and disqualifying. It not only weaponizes an opponent’s trauma but adds a partisan sheen to her allegations of abuse: Ramaswamy and his backers are implicitly suggesting that Acton’s story isn’t believable because she is a Democrat. It’s vile stuff—yet reveals a deep weakness in the GOP as it slouches toward the post-Trump era.

Although an outlier in its severity, the ad is also part of a trend. Republican candidates are attacking their Democratic opponents in crude, personal ways as they panic over an expected shellacking in the midterm elections. JD Vance blatantly insinuated that Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is gay. A super PAC with ties to Senate Republicans has taken a slightly more roundabout route to the same place, running an AI-generated ad of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff getting his hair and nails done. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is a “jihadist,” according to President Trump and Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent. (To Texas Senator Ted Cruz, “there’s every reason to believe” El-Sayed, if elected, will share information that endangers American troops with the Muslim Brotherhood.) More or less every Democratic candidate, according to more or less every elected Republican official or aspirant, is in favor of giving children gender-reassignment surgery without notifying their parent. Don’t even get them started about what will happen to your daughter’s soccer league.

These are familiar attacks because they’ve been deployed again and again by Trump, the most successful Republican this century. But they’re not quite working as planned. Talarico is leading in a state Trump won by nearly 14 points. El-Sayed is on the verge of becoming the first Muslim senator in U.S. history. Acton is leading—and if she wins, that despicable ad will have cemented her victory. Instead of pointing toward a new Trumpian Republican politics, these desperate and nasty attacks suggest something else: Trump is actually quite hard to imitate.

Personal attacks have always been part of politics, of course. Politics is a tough business, as they say. Actually, that’s exactly what JD Vance said when asked about the Ramaswamy ad on Wednesday.

Vance is defensive because the ad has been criticized across the political spectrum. National Review and The Bulwark have both published excellent pieces about its odiousness and lack of veracity. Ohio Republicans are fretting that the backlash could doom them in races across the state. But Vance is telling them to buck up: “I’m a little disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining” about the ad, he said, because Democrats make personal attacks too. He claimed that an attack ad called Ramaswamy a murderer—though I’ve been unable to locate any such ad—and concluded, angrily, “My message to fellow elected Republicans is ... stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.”

It’s a revealing answer. The ad against Acton was meant to stoke outrage—just not like this. Ramaswamy and his allies wanted a Democratic backlash, which they hoped would engender the magic of negative partisanship: a backlash on the right to the Democratic backlash. That doesn’t quite work when the outrage is coming from everywhere, including your own house. It’s hard not to see many of the attacks against Democrats, particularly the ones about gender and sexuality, as seeking to do something similar. Republicans want these attacks to stoke outrage only from Democrats, but they’re managing to offend everyone.

These Republicans are trying to replicate a maneuver perfected by Trump, who was elected president the first time after (among very many other things) questioning the war service of his own party’s 2008 presidential nominee and attacking a Gold Star family. But Trump has a gift that Vance and Ramaswamy do not. He is a master ironist, perhaps the greatest in this age of politics. His world, as Christopher Hooks wrote in this magazine last year, “is irony.” Trump, he wrote, “maintains plausible deniability until the point when he acts.” And that means that one is always at risk of taking him too seriously or not seriously enough, which is to say it’s rarely clear exactly how seriously to take what he’s saying.

That’s been a useful escape hatch for Trump. It’s undoubtedly true that many of his supporters flock to him because of his wanton cruelty, like his pledges to execute political opponents and cripple migrants. But Trump’s use of irony (and sometimes humor, loosely defined) creates a buffer between him and his audience, keeping us all guessing: Is he really serious about shooting protesters, for instance, or is that just part of the larger political game he’s playing? And the sense that he’s playing a game—one that his supporters are caught up in—is a big part of his appeal to a lot of people.

This is why Trump can say things that no other politician could get away with. This applies not only to his cruel and violent ramblings but to his many other rhetorical idiosyncrasies—like, most recently, his obsession with GOP Senator Jon Husted’s (supposedly muscular) ass. As Helen Lewis details in a sharp new Atlantic column, “Trump is politics’ answer to Joan Rivers, and his persona is influenced by all the flavors of American fakery: the carnival barker, the reality-TV host, the kayfabe world of professional wrestling,” she wrote. He is immune to shame, she added, and his “authenticity and disinhibition mean he can get a crowd of white Christians in Kentucky to listen to his homoerotic ramblings—and applaud.”

It goes without saying that Vance and Ramaswamy could never pull this off, but they would never try anyway. They’ve studied Trump and apparently have concluded that his appeal lies in his shocking meanness; then they imitate it, with straight faces, and wonder why no one finds them entertaining. Trump is really the only one who could get away with an ad like the one Ramaswamy is spending $4 million to show across Ohio right now—but I’m not sure even Trump would have approved it.