Trump, Vance, RNC Demand Republicans Stop Criticizing Ramaswamy Ad

Republican Party Adds New Plank to Its Platform: Ramaswamy’s Ad Was ‘So Good’

For a day or so, Republicans expressed discomfort with Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s new ad, in which Democrat Amy Acton’s mother denounces her as a longtime liar. Left out of the ad: that Acton and her brother have not seen their mother since the 1970s, when her mother’s husband — Acton’s stepfather — was indicted for allegedly raping Acton, then fled to avoid trial. His wife, featuring in the video, stood by him then and still does.

After that initial period of squeamishness, however, the party is cracking down, and it comes from the top. To be a Republican is to think this ad is awesome.

“The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good!” Trump said on Truth Social yesterday. He denounced Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who had objected to it.

“Our RINO Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, who I unfortunately helped get elected years ago, when he was losing by 16 points prior to my doing a Rally for him was, as usual, disloyal to the Republican Party,” Trump wrote. “He strongly suggested that Vivek should, ‘take down the Ad.’ He probably wants a Dumocrat to win, and certainly doesn’t want someone who will do a much better job than he is capable of doing.”

DeWine had, in fact, denounced the ad, describing exactly why it was so objectionable.

“The ad on its face is deeply, deeply troubling,” he said, “but when you know the rest of the story, when you know the backstory, when you know that the husband of the mom was indicted by a grand jury after hearing testimony and that he took off along with the mother and that two children never saw the mother after that. When you know that, it just, to me, makes it more serious. It makes it just more wrong.”

Vice President JD Vance and the RNC pushed the same message.

“We refuse to accept the media’s double standards when Democrats have regularly used family members of President Trump, RFK Jr, and other Republicans in ads. Voters shouldn’t buy it,” a RNC spokesperson told reporters.

“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” Vance said. “Politics is a tough business.”

MAGA’s influencers also pushed their audience to get on board, chronicler of the right Will Sommer writes, from Ben Shapiro to Glenn Beck to Megan Kelly, who compared the ad’s potency to George W. Bush’s racist “Willie Horton” ad, which, she said, “worked!”

One big exception in Sommer’s rundown is influential neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, whose Groyper movement hates Ramswamy because he is Indian. “What kind of person would run an ad like that?” Fuentes asked.

The Crypto Lobby Is Throwing Everything it Has at Sherrod Brown

• Before he was ousted from the Senate in 2025, Sherrod Brown was the top Democrat on the Banking Committee, where he was seen as a check on financial shenanigans — a frequent ally of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
• For this reason, the crypto lobby dumped $40 million into his 2024 race against Bernie Moreno, which he lost.
• The crypto lobby came out of that election celebrating its political power and demanding senators act on its favored policies.
• Now, Brown is running to return to the Senate, and the crypto lobby is going all out to defeat him — upping their spending to $55 million this week.
• The Silicon Valley billionaires who make up this interest group claimed they were going to conserve their resources for 2028 — until Democratic senators in September blocked the Clarity Act, a major crypto priority. The bill would have legitimized crypto by giving it a light-touch federal regulatory framework overseen by existing regulatory agencies.
• “Not a single Democrat voted for Clarity,” the billionaire Tyler Winklevoss whined online. “There’s a lesson in that.”
• Now, the lobby is taking revenge on Democrats, and has designated Brown its primary target.
• Brown is polling neck-and-neck with — maybe slightly ahead of — his opponent Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH).

Tabs

• Ilhan Omar says she can no longer keep living in the home federal agents searched in Washington, D.C., because the raid made the address public. “We have to figure out where to move to because our address has been public, and with the death threats that I deal with, it’s no longer going to be feasible to be in that house and have my kids visiting off and on, having people track them,” she told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes this week.
• Brazilian voters go to the polls again this weekend in a runoff election between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, attempted to overturn his election loss via a coup. Polls show them tied, Bloomberg reports.
• Data from early voting suggests Democrats are increasingly using voting in person, the Washington Post reports, perhaps a response to President Trump’s relentless attacks on mail in voting and attempts to muck up the system.

Man of the Hour

It’s Corey Lewandowski, the latest, perhaps, to be exiled from Trump world amid the president’s purging of the grifters in his orbit who are dead weight. The former puppetmaster of DHS is now being investigated by the DOJ, multiple outlets report.

Have a Good Weekend