From outside the bubble: is there still decency?

"Until this moment, ... I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness ... Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

So thundered counsel for the US Army Joe Welsh during a hearing in 1954, before the vicious Republican witch hunter Senator Joe McCarthy. That exchange marked the beginning of the end for McCarthy who died in drunken infamy shortly later.

We probably can trust that Ohio gubernatorial GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has consigned himself to similar infamy to the Wisconsin Senator's with his ad featuring his Dem opponent Amy Acton's abusive mother who has not seen her daughter for 40 years since the mother had to skip the state to escape the law.

Even Mike DeWine, Ohio's Republican governor, had to speak out against this one. About the only Ramaswamy defenders left are JD Vance and Donald Trump.

Even a business correspondent (a good one) from The Bulwark cried out in disgust. Catherine Rampell catalogues Trump's pattern of contempt for injured women and children.

It is loathsome. And yet, in a way, it is also perfectly on message. It is a microcosm of the broader Trump agenda: professing support for the vulnerable while shielding their abusers.

... But Trump’s response to the Ramaswamy ad is worth dwelling on not just because it underscores the depravity of our politics but because it reminds us how his administration, despite its rhetoric, has actually harmed victims of sexual abuse. Beyond Acton, there are thousands of other children and domestic violence victims whose lives have been made materially worse by Trump policies—and, in most cases, for no obvious electoral advantage.

Just for funsies.

For instance, the Trump administration has rolled back efforts to combat sex crimes on college campuses and in federal prisons. ... 

Trump and his supposedly tough-on-crime allies have also cut sweetheart deals with sex predators: Trump gave Ghislaine Maxwell the kid-glove treatment, while Texas Attorney General (and Republican Senate candidate) Ken Paxton offered a plea deal that would have seen an admitted child molester spend only a single day in jail.

More than just letting predators off the hook, Trump has also withdrawn support services for their survivors. The administration has terminated or frozen hundreds of grants supporting domestic abuse and sex-crime victims, grants that had been established under such laws as the Violence Against Women Act. 

The administration has also tried (unsuccessfully) to cut off legal services for domestic-abuse victims who could not immediately prove their immigration status.

And looking forward, Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget request would likewise slash funding for the Office on Violence Against Women by a quarter, including through cuts to transitional housing and legal assistance grants for families.

Relative to the disgusting Acton ad, most of these policy choices have gotten scant attention. But they all deliver the same closing message for the midterms: It was never about helping the kids.

Paul Waldman smartly assesses how Ramaswamy blundered into launching a despicable election ad which led to such universal repudiation. What were they thinking?

... Every time a candidate airs an attack ad, they make a calculation, that voters will be more persuaded by what the ad says about their opponent than what the ad says about them for having aired it. While voters say they don’t like negative campaigning, they respond to it, and if the attacks seem justified and relevant, the attacker can feel safe from backlash. If you’re saying your opponent took bribes or voted for bad policies, voters are unlikely to blame you.

But when the attacks get personal, the risk of backlash increases. And if a campaign is going to use someone’s family against them, they have to be very careful. Especially if the family member you’ve trotted out to offer testimony has a long history of petty crime and stood by while her preteen daughter was raped, then abandoned her.

But this is the nature of today’s right-wing bubble, whose residents are not only acculturated to a particular political style — cruel, vulgar, often hateful — but become convinced that it’s the only effective way to do politics, and to not do politics that way is to be weak and contemptible. That’s what JD Vance — a high-volume consumer of right-wing content and regular podcast guest — means when he says he’s “disgusted” by “whining” from Republicans about Ramaswamy’s ad.

The failure to anticipate the nearly inevitable reaction to the use of Acton’s mother springs directly from that inability to see how things look from outside the bubble. When the backlash began, Ramaswamy acted the way Trump does whenever people are appalled by something he has done or said: Don’t apologize, don’t retreat, blame your opponents, and double down. 

If I were an Ohio resident, I'd be having a hard time voting for Acton. She seems a more authentic transphobe than many Dem pols who are accommodating conventional prejudices. But I sure hope she can defeat Ramaswamy and we can all live to fight another day in Ohio and beyond.