This is not to discredit the existence of some underlying tactical or strategic calculations, and it is absolutely not extending credit to the shockingly vile creatures doing it, but when you see a reactionary candidate being disgusting, it is safe to assume that they are doing it because they really believe in it. The decade and change in which Donald Trump has been the main character in American public life has been a notably bad one for metaphor and subtext, among other things, but it has been a notably revealing one where some fundamental national political impulses are concerned. Trump himself is too dim and too brazen for that game's familiar euphemisms, and his inability or unwillingness to promise to deliver harm in the usual coded language was central to his political appeal. It was also novel enough to convince some people that he was interested in doing something other than inflicting that pain.
This was true for partisans who thrilled at hearing him make explicit the implicit conservative value of hurting the most vulnerable people, and also to a significant faction of people without any other real values who mistook the brutal liberties that Trump has always taken for himself for ones that they would be able to enjoy themselves by supporting him. There is no other way to say it: Donald Trump inspired these people. He inspired them to be their worst and smallest and cruelest selves, but inspiration is a value-neutral thing. This is to say that he inspired those people to be more like him, and to live as he lives—in the indulgent certainty that even their puniest comfort or fleeting amusement or flash of childish anger was more important than anything or anyone else in the world, and then to behave accordingly. Many of these people surely had suspected as much already and moved through the world as if it were true; the carnage and stupid suffering that all that heedless, headlong motion produces is everywhere you look. Some of these people, inevitably, were going to run for political office.
People like that will always be a danger to everyone around them, but it's at this point that they truly become everyone's problem. There is a world in which Vivek Ramaswamy is just one of the many millions of Americans—please do not think about how many there are, how many you have met and will someday meet—who just are like this, and move through their days with what even a layperson could diagnose as "walking malignant narcissism." But that alternate-universe Ramaswamy would be contained within some grim gated community and grim gated personal and business relationships; his capacity to do the damage such a person would invariably do would be limited to those unfortunate enough to wind up in his path. That Ramaswamy would also be an extremely odious man, a curdled being driven entirely by resentment and appetite. But very few people would ever know his name. That's the best-case scenario.
The Vivek Ramaswamy that we got instead is a failed presidential candidate and flailing Republican gubernatorial candidate in Ohio. Our Ramaswamy is connected enough and slick enough and rich enough to have won the GOP nomination for this office, even at a moment when his party is more gleefully hostile to anyone of his background—Ramaswamy is Indian-American and Hindu—than at any other moment in my lifetime. That crude bigotry is central to conservative politics in a way that is not new, but is newly overt, and Ramaswamy himself has faced a great deal of it. It is a testament to his deep dedication to the movement's vile anti-principles and his own singular unpleasantness that this does not really make him any more sympathetic.
Like many other candidates otherwise without any ideas about using the office they seek to address any of the many grinding horrors of American life, Ramaswamy got as far as he has by making a scaled-down version of Trump's promises in similarly shameless and dishonest ways. That is, by pledging that he would be exactly as cruel as all those newly liberated little Trumps to all the same people and in all the same ways that those little Trumps would, and also that he would obey Trump's own whims with appropriately lavish servility. None of that would make anyone's life better—it would, due to some crucial things absent in Ramaswamy's being, probably not even make his own life much more fulfilled—but it was the most he could offer, and the most that his similarly benighted public would ever ask. It is enough that they know the right people's lives will be made worse.
That gambit is not going well. Ramaswamy may yet defeat his Democratic opponent, former Ohio Department of Health director Dr. Amy Acton; the state favors Republicans very strongly now, and also this is just an extremely lousy and evil moment, which makes it tough to count out lousy and evil candidates. But this moment is also bad enough in specific ways—essential stuff is expensive and getting more so, for reasons that that are obviously attributable to the president and his party; a free market in the last thrashing stages of syphilitic decline seems dead set on closing hospitals and opening data centers, which the president and his party are fine with—that Ramaswamy and other candidates who tied themselves to Trump are suffering badly from that association.
Recent polls show Ramaswamy running behind Dr. Acton. The sneering, vicious slop on which he and so many other candidates are running doesn't really offer any answers to or even acknowledgement of any of these very obvious problems. That slop is what reactionaries have long relied on as a substitute for any of that, and also they do not really believe that those problems need to be "solved." Those problems, and the congeries of downstream suffering and precariousness that makes up so much of American public life, are precisely what they are trying to lock into place forever. Ramaswamy is running on making sure that none of that changes, both at a material level and a lower, vibe-driven one—to keep every sadistic relationship and exchange in public life exactly as demeaning as it currently is. The challenge, at some point, becomes finding a sufficiently depraved way to make that promise.
On Monday, the indispensable Ohio political blog The Rooster reported on an ad that the Ramaswamy campaign was testing in focus groups but had not yet released. The Rooster also reported that the campaign had been bragging about it for weeks. It is one minute long, and features Dr. Amy Acton's estranged mother, Donna Arthur, warning that her daughter is a liar who must not be trusted with high office.
Acton's public biography explains why this ad exists. She suffered terribly in her young life while under her mother's erratic and abusive care: Acton lived through a Youngstown winter spent sleeping in a tent and, between the ages of 9 and 12, was subjected to sexual abuse by Arthur's husband. She ultimately filed a complaint against her stepfather, who was subsequently indicted for sexual assault; she and her younger brother were removed from her mother's custody. Arthur and her husband fled Ohio to avoid those rape charges, and Arthur remained with him until he died in 2004; the candidate and her birth mother have been estranged for decades, although Arthur did attack her in an interview with the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue in 2020. When the Ramaswamy campaign issued a statement saying "we don’t know what happened between Amy Acton and her mother," it was actually saying that it hoped to make this fairly well-known thing seem less knowable in a way that might benefit them. On Wednesday, Axios reported that the Ramaswamy campaign plans to spend $4 million airing the ad over the campaign's last days. On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance said the ad "calls it out like it is."
This is a desperate, nasty candidate doing desperate, nasty shit, but it is not just that. It is a tactical decision on the Ramaswamy campaign's part to be as disgusting as possible—to make common cause with a woman who abandoned her children to live with the pedophile rapist who harmed her daughter—but it is also an ideological one, and a crystalline statement of what latter-day Trumpism is about, and who it is for. It is an undeniable fact that, from Trump himself all the way down, the contemporary Republican Party is not just exceptionally welcoming of violent abusers as candidates and cabinet-level appointees, but affirmatively aligned with that abuse and those abusers. People like that, abusers and their abettors, are the party's constituency and its leaders.
Some of that is ideological, but a great deal of it is just reflex. Trump, who only understands things in terms of size and leverage, would personally identify with that predation and the worldview behind it; he's made his life out of that. But Trump would also choose abuser over abused because he would not ever want to be confused for the weaker half of any binary. Trump would identify, instantly and instinctively, with the person doing the most harm, because they would seem to him to be winning.
This is a desperate and empty way of seeing the world, and the inhumane fear at the heart of it—of being hurt, or just of being seen to have been hurt—only makes it crueler. If the world is only abusers and the abused, then someone desperate and empty in these ways would side with and in time make themselves into abusers on principle. The Republicans have implicitly been the Abusive Parent Party ever since Trump busted out its feckless prior ownership and took things over; in the dreadful, algorithmic, inevitable way in which bad things go about getting worse in contemporary life, this has now become explicit, and literal.
That is, it has become policy. Think of Elon Musk dropping in, inflicting his own personal damage on the government in a pantomime of decisive paternal leadership, and then flitting away while disclaiming and denying the consequences. Think of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scaling up his own sadistic rich-kid deficits into what is now more or less a campaign of Munchausen By Proxy against every child on earth; of Pete Hegseth projecting his bully's prerogative throughout not just the American military, but across the world; of the big man himself gambling away the rent money on his grandiose gut and passing whims and then demanding thanks for having been brave enough to do it. Think of the masked men with guns who would not be able to hold any job but the exceptional and perverse one they've been given, which is to go out across the nation and find someone to hurt. That this movement is so fixated on children is telling—there is the web-damaged eugenic wish for More White Ones, sure, but more significantly there is an abiding mission to control and punish at scale; to make sure that kids do not learn anything their parents do not know, or become anyone but who their parents want them to be, or believe anything but what their parents believe.
If there is an ideology to find in the bundle of strident and unworkable anti-solutions that makes up this movement's platform, it is this—a crusade to pry apart every vital, caring thing that binds people together, but also and more saliently to keep everyone under the thumb of a depraved cohort of coddled and volatile sadists. The idea, the only idea, is for those punishers to remain unpunished for as long as possible, and then to sneak into heaven before the devil knows they're dead. We live, at this moment, within that shameful victory, but it is not complete. If you have wondered how Vivek Ramaswamy can be the way he is, or why he is that way, the short answer is that he is just like that. Another one is that he knows just what he stands to lose.
