It won’t come as a surprise, if you’ve been reading me a while, to hear I’m voting straight-ticket Democrat. I’ll tell you why, but first I want to tell you about Donna.
Donna lived in a filthy car filled with kittens. One of them baked to death in the sweltering heat a few summers ago, earning her an animal neglect conviction. I’m not knocking Donna for being hard-up. I would never do that. I’m not Donald Trump. I don’t mock Americans anxious about affordability for being unable to afford a $5,000 meal at Mar-a-Lago. I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago. It’s as gaudy as everyone says and far worse. A dwelling fit for an Eastern European strongman. The marble floors make it easy for sycophants to slither to and fro on their bellies. I didn’t get a peek at the menu. I did, however, notice evil seems to ooze out of gold-and-crystal-washed walls that have undoubtedly borne witness to all manner of cursed sights. There is moral squalor in opulence.
I don’t think it’s funny that Donna has lived in squalor herself; it’s tragic. But I do think it’s funny that Trump’s party attempted to reinvent her as a paragon of truth and integrity in an act of shocking political cynicism, one that I hope costs Republicans control of the governor’s mansion.
Donna fled Ohio in 1978 with her man, Cledith Arthur, to avoid his felony trial for raping her daughter. He was charged with incest for allegedly raping one of his own daughters just a few years prior. But this woman, Donna Arthur, sided with Cledith over her own child and stayed with him until he died in 2004.
Vivek Ramaswamy dredged up Donna and made her the centerpiece of an ad attacking his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, in Ohio’s gubernatorial race. The last time Amy saw or spoke to Donna was in 1978, at a court appearance following Cledith’s arrest. Acton tried to give her mother a kiss, and Donna turned away. She was a child.
“Amy has a serious problem,” Donna says in the ad, speaking with the quavering timbre of someone who seems unwell. “She is a liar. She lies about her past.”
“She says she grew up living in a tent,” Donna said. “None of that is true.”
Except it is true.
The tent. Cledith’s prior incest charge; there are contemporaneous local news reports about both Cledith’s incest and Amy Acton’s rape. The staunchly conservative National Review corroborated details of her account with court documents. Her brother, Philip Stearns, also backed her story in a statement. “After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died,” he said.
Even the sister of Christine, Cledith’s other victim and biological daughter, stepped into Acton’s corner. She told the Daily Mail that Cledith raped Christine, who died in 2024, “more than once” when she was about the same age as Acton. That’s why she believes Acton.
“It was a terrible time for our family and it’s very hard to talk about it,” Christine’s sister said. “My brother won’t say anything at all. It’s a nightmare for us to relive what happened in our family after all these years.”
According to Zeteo, Ramaswamy’s team told him that using Donna to attack her daughter was incredibly risky and ill-advised. Apart from the terrible optics of such an ad, Donna also has a lengthy rap sheet. In 2022, during a hearing for animal neglect charges, court documents state that she was found “to be not credible.” That’s a pretty serious red flag—and an easy one to dig up. But Ramaswamy went through with it anyway because he was born without that part of the human psyche that aches at sin. Donna was cleaned up just enough for the ad and then apparently returned to the curb. Ramaswamy did not care about Donna beyond her utility as a cudgel to crack over her daughter’s head.
More importantly, though, Ramaswamy did what he did because he knows something important about the political environment: you can side with the mom who defends her daughter’s rapist—hell, you can side with the rapist, too—in the era of Donald Trump, and the cavalry will come anyway. And come it did. First, in the form of JD Vance.
Speaking to the press, Vance condemned the few Republicans who expressed outrage at the ad: “I have to admit that 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.” He made it clear that “whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern.”
The strangest thing about Vance’s approach was that he was even grosser than Ramaswamy. He seemed to positively relish the cruelty of it. Indeed, he noted at an Ohio rally that he “wasn’t even supposed to talk about” it, “but I cannot help myself.” Ramaswamy, he declared, “had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is, and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
He took a slightly different tack in an interview with Raymond Arroyo, saying that “these situations are always very tough,” and adding, “getting in the middle of some of that drama is not something I want to do.”
To recap, Vance isn’t at all concerned with the rightness or wrongness of an ad that claims a woman lied about the abuse she suffered—housing insecurity and, yes, rape—when she was about the same age as Vance’s eldest kid. But Vance doesn’t want to weigh in on that because child abuse is “tough.” Most people would argue that it’s pretty straightforward: don’t do that, and don’t side with people who do, or with those who protect the perpetrators. For Vance, who majored in philosophy at Ohio State, there is apparently a lot of gray here, a lot of complexity, or something. It’s unclear what he means. What he knows for certain is that he doesn’t want to get “in the middle” of that drama. Except, of course, he agrees the ad “calls it out like it is” when Donna claims Acton invented her childhood trauma. I hope that clarifies his views on the matter.
It seems odd that Vance would be so callous toward Acton in this context, given that he, far more than she, traded on family trauma to break into politics. That was the entire point of the Hillbilly Elegy publicity drive. Acton has done interviews here and there discussing her troubled upbringing; Vance wrote a whole book about it that was adapted into a movie—a path to prominence that invited accusations of exploiting and commodifying private family trauma that now seem well-founded. Trauma was the only thing people knew about Vance after Peter Thiel facilitated Vance’s introduction to Trump in February 2021 and he lurched into national politics.
Vance shared his announcement outline with me two days before formally launching his Senate bid that year. The first section mentions Hillbilly Elegy. If you revisit his announcement speech, Vance opens by mentioning that his “papaw and mamaw” raised him because, “as many of you know, my mom struggled with addiction.” And why were so many in the audience already aware of that piece of family trauma? Because there’s a Ron Howard movie about it. Vance has made millions of dollars off of his family trauma. An honest comparison of Acton and Vance would find that Vance has gone to much further lengths to turn his mother’s mistreatment of him into political and cultural capital.
Still, how could he not empathize with someone whose childhood was as bad or worse than his own? Having known him personally, I can say—and this isn’t groundbreaking—that he has no moral backbone. I don’t quite understand how he doesn’t simply collapse like a folding chair when he stands and walks with that waddling gait that calls to mind the ungraceful undulations of the living mattresses in Life, the Universe and Everything. The author, Douglas Adams, invents a term to describe their odd locomotion: “flollop.” Vance flollops through life believing in nothing, being nothing. A patchwork scarecrow clothed in discordant bits and pieces, pockets stuffed with other people’s talking points and personalities, always offering himself up to tend the fields of different masters. Vance is a man with three names and no name, if a name is something that tells us who someone is, for Vance clearly doesn’t know the answer.
Then came Trump, riding to defend the indefensible.
“I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse,” he said. The least surprising aspect of all this was Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime dear friend coming down on the side of a dead child rapist. Trump knows a thing or two about trying to discredit a victim, and was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming one. What more is there to say?
Voting Democrat feels like observing an obligation to put country over partisanship. Regardless of the outcome, a vote for Democrats is a vote against a party that enables unprecedented political and moral corruption, against the nakedly authoritarian ambitions of lunatics who feel unbound from legal or ethical constraints. Now it’s also a vote against people who side with child abusers and their defenders. It’s not just that Republicans are terrible at governing; it’s that they encourage people to acclimatize themselves to new and outrageous moral lows all the time. That might work in favor of those of us who have had enough.
Ramaswamy abruptly pulled the Donna ad this week after Axios reported that it had backfired with Ohio voters, according to GOP internal polling. Will it cost him the race? I don’t know. I hope so.
Great piece- second Dana’s thanks. Sad and hard but straightforward and necessary. Vance is almost pitiful in his emptiness and striving but the cruelty and power makes any kind of sympathy impossible for me.
Voting straight Democrat. You seem too intelligent to do that.