Vivek Ramaswamy’s Disgusting Amy Acton Ad Blows Up in His Face

Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting campaign advertisement featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother is already backfiring.

The Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee’s team finally claimed credit Tuesday for an ugly attack ad featuring Donna Arthur, who lost custody of Acton after years of documented issues, including homelessness and sexual abuse by a stepfather. In the video, Arthur accused her daughter of lying about her upbringing.

The video did not originally include any sponsors or political disclosures. Now Ramaswamy’s campaign is paying $4 million to stream the ad because it did well with “persuadable” voters, Axios reported. It’s a surprising move considering that the rhetoric was so far afield from responsible campaigning that even Republicans are recoiling.

Meghan McCain slammed the “dastardly” ad, and Utah Senator Mike Lee’s longtime aide Dan Hauser publicly apologized for sharing it online.

A Republican operative close to Ramaswamy’s campaign told Politico’s Playbook Wednesday: “It’s so gross to forsake family members for politics. I think it’s bad. It’s just morally bad.”

Another senior GOP operative familiar with MAGA Inc.’s strategy told Playbook: “If Republicans are failing to lay out a reason to come vote for them and saying, ‘Here’s what I, as a candidate, am for, what I am going to do to make your economics better,’ there’s a good chance they’re going to lose.”

Not only does the advertisement fail to deliver a closing argument, but more than anything, it serves to resurface Acton’s devastating family history and remind people why they hate Ramaswamy so much in the first place.

The ad is reminiscent of his clash with former Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, when he brought up her daughter during a debate. In response to his latest low blow, Haley said Tuesday: “He’s a bad guy. It’s a shame he continues to get away with it.”

Acton’s campaign responded with its own advertisement Tuesday, in which her brother Philip Stearns discussed the abuse they experienced as children. “I experienced a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,” he said.

“Shame on Vivek. It’s the contempt he has for Amy. It’s the contempt he has for Ohio. He’s not fit to lead,” he added.

Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “humanitarian.”

The comment came after Russia on Wednesday released 74-year-old Stephen James Hubbard, an American who spent four years locked up under accusations of being a Ukrainian mercenary.

“He’s a 75-year-old man. You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff said to Putin. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that. I commend you.”

Hubbard was no mercenary, and the Russian president is no humanitarian. In reality, Hubbard was a Michigan native who lived a nomadic lifestyle, entering a relationship with a Ukrainian woman and choosing to stay in the country when the relationship ended. He was arrested by Russia in 2022 and was tortured and starved while in prison.

This rhetoric from Witkoff—a former real estate developer who has somehow become the most trusted international diplomat aside from Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner—was widely panned.

“No. Putin is stone cold killer,” Republican Senator John Cornyn wrote, opposing the Trump administration’s fealty to the Kremlin.

“Absurd simpering obsequiousness from a representative of the most powerful country on earth, and another American humiliation, to add to the growing, growing list,” Jimmy Rushton of The Kyiv Independent said.

Putin is also currently wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, as his war on Ukraine has resulted in the deaths of at least 125,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 15,000 civilians. He has also created a Ukrainian refugee crisis, forcing millions of people to flee their homes since he began his invasion in 2022.

Democratic nominee for Congress and former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was detained by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank Wednesday morning. 

“I’ve been detained by the IDF, along with a group of rabbis & volunteers. We were simply harvesting olives in a grove near Nehalim in the West Bank,” Lander posted on X with a picture from a bus showing Israeli soldiers standing at the front. “The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.”

Lander was among 90 volunteers with Rabbis for Human Rights who were detained near Nahalin, a village close to Bethlehem, while helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives. The group told The Jerusalem Post that the farmers weren’t able to access their groves for three years.  

According to the Post, Israeli troops arrived two hours after work had started and declared the area a closed military zone. The volunteers agreed to leave the area, but were still detained. The group was mixed between foreign activists and Israeli citizens. 

Lander posted a video about his trip before he was detained, saying, “Our goals for the trip are to help protect the olive harvest—and to shed a light on the reality of the occupation. To ensure that international solidarity goes beyond the harvest, to become a sustained commitment to protecting Palestinian communities from settler violence, forced displacement, and the ongoing threats to their right to remain on their land.”  

Lander’s detention comes after Washington Post journalist Heidi Levine was beaten and robbed by Israeli settlers at an olive tree grove in the West Bank last week. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee issued a rare condemnation of the attack, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the facts of the “alleged” attack are still under investigation. They have yet to comment on Lander’s detention by Israeli forces.  

Texas’s five biggest counties smashed voter turnout records on the state’s first day of early voting in the midterm elections.

Harris, Dallas, Bexar, Travis, and Tarrant counties all eclipsed early voting records for at least two of the last three elections, Sawyer Hackett, a political strategist, posted on X Tuesday. Some of those records were set during President Donald Trump’s last midterm elections, in 2018.

Voter turnout was high in the few counties won by former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election. In Harris County, the state’s most populous county, more than 104,600 people cast their ballots on Monday. That breaks the previous midterm record set in 2018, when 63,188 votes were cast and Democrats went on to recapture the House.

In Dallas County, home to more than two million people, 76,079 voters cast their ballots, eclipsing the 2018 midterm record of 59,389, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins reported.

In Bexar County, 42,776 voters cast their ballots on the first day of early voting—the highest first-day turnout for a midterm election or non-presidential election in the county’s history.

In Travis County, 40,777 voters cast their ballots, surpassing records from 2022 and 2018, according to the county clerk’s office.

Turnout was also high in some counties where Trump was more popular—but that doesn’t mean Republicans have sealed the deal. In Tarrant County, 50,149 voters cast ballots, a 20 percent increase in voter turnout from 2018. Trump previously won Tarrant county by five points in 2024, after President Joe Biden flipped the county in 2020.

President Trump bizarrely spoke about being in his third term as president at a White House event on Tuesday.

Trump was speaking to reporters at the White House about a new anti-fraud program at the Department of Justice, and as usual, he went off-topic. 

“So we have now a border that’s as strong as we’ve ever had by far. It’s been that way since the very beginning of my second term, or third term, depending on the way you want to define it, and I don’t want the results of this; I’d like the third term but I don’t want the results of the second term,” Trump said, alluding to the false idea that he should have won the 2020 presidential election but was thwarted by election fraud. 

Trump went on to brag more about border security and make false claims about the economy going well, but his mention of a third term is sure to invite speculation about whether he plans to flout the Constitution and try to run for president again. There’s also the fact that he’s repeating false election conspiracies as a pretext to interfere in November’s midterms.  

Federal officials are seizing voting machines and ballots, trying to grab voter rolls without legal justification, and bringing Democratic states to court based on flimsy evidence. Are all of these attempts at averting massive Republican losses in two weeks Trump’s way of ensuring he can do what he wants as president? 

So far, Trump’s agenda has only been limited by the courts, with Republicans in Congress reluctant to rein him in on any of his bad decisions, from the Iran war to his whimsical tariffs. He probably sees a GOP-controlled Congress as the only way to keep acting with impunity and avoid any kind of checks on his power, including violating the Constitution.