JD Vance has a message for the Republicans who took a principled stand this week against a campaign ad that smears a rape survivor: quit your bitching.
He went to Ohio on Wednesday and answered a BBC question about a recent, controversial Vivek Ramaswamy campaign ad in which his opponent's estranged mother, Amy Acton, calls her own daughter a liar. Acton was raped by that woman’s husband, her stepfather, when she was 11 and 12. The state took her away from them both, and her mother stayed married to him until he died. A number of Republicans spent Tuesday condemning this ad on camera, with some force: “unbelievably disgusting,” “political malpractice,” “he’s a bad guy.” No lie was detected.
So how did the vice president react to the clearly disgusting ad? “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern.” I’m sorry, what now?
He had more to say. “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.” And then, at a rally an hour later, the version for the crowd: Ramaswamy “had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
So the ad isn’t the problem in the eyes of the Vice President. It's the Republicans who object to it that are the real scourge here. Vance used “disgusted,” the same word Jason Rantz and Terry Sullivan used to describe the ad on CNN, and he pointed it at them.
None of this should surprise anyone who was paying attention during his last big political campaign in September 2024. When asked by Dana Bash about the baseless Haitians-eating-pets conspiracy, Vance said: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” When Bash pointed out he’d just admitted to creating a story, he said what he meant was “we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”
In other words, it’s okay to be full of shit if it gets others to buy that bullshit as legit. By the way, that false story led to real bomb threats that emptied Springfield’s public schools. What are we doing here, people?
It’s a bizarre doctrine of rationalized lying if it works, and it hasn’t changed in two years. True or false doesn’t matter. Decent or indecent doesn’t matter. What matters is whether it gets on TV. In Springfield, dog-eating made air, and Haitian immigrants paid for it. Two years later, in Ohio, it made air again, and this time it’s a woman who spent years telling a terrible story about her childhood, now being used against her. What the actual fuck?
Vance did offer a defense, and it’s the one you’d probably expect. Politics is a tough business, he said. Campaign ads have called Ramaswamy a murderer, he added, and people have gone after the president’s own family. A party that spends its last two weeks fighting over one commercial is a party that loses. It might even have a whiff of truth to it, but it’s also exactly what you say once you’ve decided the ad is totally fine and you want everyone to just STOP TALKING ABOUT IT.
Vance’s line about campaigning against family members deserves a second look. The Vice President insisted that Democrats have put “the strange family members” of the president in ads, which is a seeming reference to Mary Trump. There is a clear difference between a niece with a book and a mother who sided with her daughter’s rapist. Vance knows that, which makes the both-sides comparison all the more regrettable.
JD Vance is the current frontrunner for 2028, and he has now told you twice how he plans to get there. On Wednesday, he told the Republicans who objected to the ad what he thinks of them. If the tactic bothers you, no matter how ugly and distasteful, you don’t want to win. That’s the party he wants to lead, one in which nobody gets to mind. And there is no bar too low.