Thank You, God, Very Much

The president of the United States watched a sixty-second ad built on the childhood rape of his opponent, and his advice to the man who aired it was to look up and thank God.

"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."

— President Donald Trump, Truth Social post, October 22, 2026

The ad is sixty seconds long. It shows an elderly woman with thin gray hair, looking into a camera and saying, "I love my daughter, but... Amy has a serious problem." Her name is Donna Arthur. The daughter she is describing is Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio. The thing the ad is actually about is not mentioned anywhere in it. It does not need to be. In 1978, in Mahoning County, Ohio, a grand jury indicted Arthur's husband, Cledith Arthur, on a rape charge involving a child under 13. The victim was 12 years old. She testified in court that year.

The details come from court records obtained by NBC News and from Acton's own account, which she has told publicly, including while serving as Ohio's public health director during the pandemic. "Between the ages of 10 and 12, I was sexually abused by her husband, while my birth mother did nothing to protect me," Acton wrote after the ad surfaced. "My birth mother's husband was arrested, charged with rape, and indicted by a grand jury. At 12 years old, I testified in court. I haven't seen my birth mother since that day in 1978. She and her husband fled the state and he was declared a fugitive." He was never prosecuted. He died in 2004.

The ad's mechanism is simple. A mother who chose the indicted man over her own children is now, in a spot produced by her daughter's political opponent, calling her daughter a liar. The implication does the work: if the mother says she lies, maybe the rape story is a lie. Maybe the 12-year-old who testified in 1978 was mistaken. The ad never names the crime. The audience already knows what the mother is defending, and that knowledge is the whole engine.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, did not deny making it. He claimed responsibility the day after the spot first circulated on social media Monday, and his campaign says it will spend $4 million more to air it. "It had nothing to do with childhood abuse," he told a crowd in Strongsville, Ohio, on Friday, while accusing the "flawed and failed media" of "lying about an ad that is about lying."

The president of the United States saw the missing fact and waved it away. On Thursday he posted on Truth Social that the backlash proved Democratic envy: the Democrats "would be totally supportive," he wrote, and "it would go down as the Ad of the Decade." At a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, that same night, he recounted a phone call in which Ramaswamy asked, "What would you recommend? Because I'm getting killed in the press." Trump's answer: "I said, 'You got to ride with it.'" Then the prayer: "So I told him, 'Leave it up, and look upstairs and say, Thank you, God, very much. I appreciate it.'"

On Friday, at the White House, he doubled down. Asked whether he would change his mind now that he knew the stepfather had been indicted for rape, Trump answered: "No. No. It's a mother speaking badly against Amy Acton. You don't know anything." He called Donna Arthur "very lucid" and "very smart." "Her mother went on television and said that the daughter who's running for governor of Ohio is a liar and a bad person, and that's all I know." When an NBC reporter asked whether the sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to him, the president cut her off: "Quiet! Isn't she a fresh person? You're a horrible little reporter, aren't you?"

Translation: in the White House, a $4 million ad built on a child's rape is not a crisis to contain. It is a gift to bless.

The pushback from inside the party was real, and it mostly came from people who have something to lose. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican who endorsed Ramaswamy earlier this year, called the ad "deeply, deeply troubling" and "wrong," and urged it be taken down. He kept his support for the ticket. Senator Jon Husted, running against Sherrod Brown in Ohio's close Senate race, said he would not have run the ad. Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate candidate from Iowa who faces a tight race of her own, said, "I think about it as a mom." She called the spot "absolutely terrible" and said Ramaswamy should pull it. Rep. Nancy Mace, the Republican from South Carolina who has spoken publicly about being a sexual assault survivor, called it "the most shameful, disgusting, offensive ad this election season." "We are not the party of pedophilia," she said.

Former Rep. Jim Renacci, a former Ohio Republican congressman, wrote that "the floor may have just fallen out from under the Republican campaign for Ohio Governor." The editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch endorsed Acton after the ad dropped, describing it as "revolting and unsettling." MK Pritzker, the wife of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, donated $500,000 to Acton's campaign.

The vice president of the United States took the other side. JD Vance, a former Ohio senator, told Republicans to "stop whining" about the ad. "Politics is a tough business," he said in Cincinnati. "If you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days."

Why the ad landed as badly as it did is not just a decency question. It is a timing question. The handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files has been a slow, smoldering scandal inside the party for months, and in Ohio that anger now has a ballot. Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones, who has covered the fallout, put it this way: Republicans are watching a candidate use a child's sexual abuse to win a campaign, and in the shadow of Epstein, a lot of them have decided, "That is where I draw the line."

The ad's own logic is also eating the party. The spot says the daughter is a liar. The record says the stepfather was indicted by a grand jury, the daughter testified at 12, and the mother left with the man after losing custody of the children. Every time that record is repeated, the mother's claim in the ad reads less like a defense and more like a confession. In her own spot, Acton's brother described the abuse he and his sister endured as children and chided Ramaswamy for turning sexual assault into "a political talking point."

The VoteHub poll released Thursday, before the ad went full blast, had Acton leading Ramaswamy by a point, inside the margin of error. An ad cannot be blamed for a race its candidate was not winning, and it cannot be credited with saving one he could not win. What the ad did is something more useful: it showed, precisely, where this political project thinks the ground truth is. In this ecosystem, a 12-year-old's rape is not a horror story. It is a tested attack vector. The mother is the witness. The indictment is a subject change. The press is a horrible little reporter. And the president is the focus group.

If Acton wins, she will be the first Democrat to hold the Ohio governorship since Dick Celeste left office in 1991. Back in 1978, a 12-year-old testified in an Ohio courtroom, and her mother chose the man the grand jury had indicted and left with him. Forty-eight years later, the president of the United States watched that choice broadcast to millions of voters, and told the man who aired it to look up and say thank you, God. The prayer, at least, has been said. The ad stays up until November 3.