Ramaswamy Pulls His Reviled Ad After it Hurts Him in the Polls

Ramaswamy Is Very Disappointed That Everyone is Talking About His Ad and Not ‘Policy’

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign has stopped running the ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother denouncing her as a liar.

The ad repulsed voters, especially after they learned the backstory: Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, had not been in touch with her daughter since her husband, Acton’s stepfather, was accused of raping Acton in the 1970s, when Acton was 12 years old. Arthur and her husband then fled to avoid a trial.

One internal poll, described by Axios, found that voters who were aware of the ad disapproved of it 2-to-1 and found Ramaswamy falling behind in the polls as a result of it.

Earlier this week, Trump continued to defend Ramaswamy.”Vivek was treated very unfairly,” he said. “He had the mother of his opponent say that her daughter was a liar. I said, ‘why can’t I have an opponent like that?’ She said worse than that. Horrible things about her own daughter. And the press — the fake news — criticized him.”

Ramaswamy tried to claim his campaign had not pulled the ad.

“It ran to completion, and we put up four other ads,” he claimed, speaking to the press yesterday.

The campaign had set aside $4 million for it, according to the Columbus Dispatch, but only spent $1 million.

Ramaswamy then tried to shame a reporter for asking about it. “For all of the discussion around 30 second ads, I would love, even for this final close, for this campaign to really be about policy.”

Black Workers Flee Government; Administration Tries to Replace Them With Young Right-Wingers

• More than a year ago, TPM’s Layla A. Jones was flagging troubling numbers in federal jobs data, showing the impact that DOGE and other Trump efforts to remake the federal government were having on Black workers. Black Americans are overrepresented among the federal workforce.
• A Washington Post report yesterday followed up on this story, finding that about one in five black workers has left the federal government during Trump’s second term.
• Between late 2024 and September 2025, “the estimated number of Black people working for the government fell by 30 percent,” The Post reported. “By comparison, reported federal employment declined by 4 percent among all other races included in the survey.”
• On Thursday, TPM published a story by Bex Heimbrock on the Trump administration’s recruiting efforts. Office of Personnel Management head Scott Kupor has been touring the country with Turning Point USA aligned influencers, including Benny Johnson, seeking to recruit young — and presumably deeply conservative — college graduates. “What I really want to see is more people like ‘Big Balls,’ or Ed,” said Kupor, referring to former DOGE staffer Edward Coristine.

Tabs

• The big news in the second half of this week is the Trump administration subpoenaing California election workers, a dramatic escalation in its campaign to get the state to set aside the ballots of people on error-filled lists of supposed noncitizen voters. We’ll be following that and similar developments in our liveblog.
• Benjamin Netanyahu becomes the latest international right-wing leader to claim widespread fraud after an election where he was not the clear-cut winner.
• If Democrats retake both chambers of Congress, they will have a chance to block Trump’s scheme to use the Census to remake how political power works in America, Layla A. Jones reports, and previews the options available.
• Hackers stole an estimated $6.3 billion from crypto exchange Binance, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Woman of the Hour

It’s Alina Habba Mildon, previously in The Brief for her deal to get a Venezuelan billionaire a pardon in exchange for $50 million. Trump is very angry about this. But there’s an off ramp for Mildon: She simply needs to give the president his cut. “In calls with allies last week, Mr. Trump raged about the scale of the contract and said he wanted Mrs. Mildon to give a portion of the money to one of his causes,” The New York Times reports.