Trump and Vance accelerate downward political spiral

“Politics ain’t beanbag,” is a famous warning to politicians. They have to tough as the toughest baseball players to win, throwing hardballs at opponents and sliding with their spikes up. Well, the 2026 midterms have now gone from hardball to lowball.

Here is a list of scummy political advertising, complete with despicable lies.

Let’s save the most reprehensible for last.

First, right-wing smear merchants, aided by Elon Musk’s X platform , trashed Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (D) with wretchedly false claims. They said the Democrat left the campaign trail for treatment at an Ohio hospital for the insane.

It was a despicable lie. Talarico stopped campaigning while recovering from the flu.

The lie was a diversion from the multiple scandals tarring Talarico’s opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).

The truth about Paxton is that a Republican-controlled Texas House impeached him in 2023 . His wife filed for divorce on “Biblical grounds.” He has offered no credible explanation for how, as a state government employee, he amassed a multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio reportedly encompassing 15 properties .

His own senior staff reported his conduct to the FBI. Even some leading Texas Republicans are repulsed. Members of the Bush family — Barbara Bush and Neil Bush — are supporting Talarico. Second in the race to the bottom is the Muslim hating attacks on Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), his Republican opponent, portrays El-Sayed as a terrorist sympathizer and supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. Rogers is making an ugly appeal to Islamophobia, trading on the bigoted idea that American Muslims have terrorist sympathies.

Rogers is willing to exploit that ugly, hateful sentiment by connecting El Sayed’s mother and relatives to social media posts that have nothing to do with El Sayed. Ads made using artificial intelligence show a fabricated El Sayed laughing at calls for “Death to America.”

Odious lies about Muslims, so poisonously divisive, still resonate 25 years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But that is not the winner for the lowest act in this lineup of slander of 2026. That dishonor goes to Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R). His campaign ran an advertisement in which the elderly mother of his gubernatorial opponent, Amy Acton (D), accuses the Democrat of lying about her childhood traumas.

Ramaswamy’s political attack has no mention of Acton’s stepfather being charged with abusing a 12-year-old girl. Acton has identified herself as that child. Acton’s mother sided with the man charged with abusing her daughter. Ramaswamy ignored public records showing that Acton’s stepfather was indicted.

The mother lost custody of Acton and her brother while remaining married to the accused abuser, who left the state and failed to appear in court.

Acton’s younger brother, Philip Stearns, lashed the Ramaswamy ad as a “despicable low.” Stearns described Ramaswamy as “a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”

Stearns said it was unbelievable that Ramaswamy would “turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point.”

Leading Republican women also castigated Ramaswamy.

“This ad is going to go down as the most shameful, disgusting, offensive ad this election season,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) told CNN . She added that Ramaswamy has “managed to limbo under the lowest bar of decency in this country.”

Instead of retracting and apologizing for the ad, Ramaswamy’s campaign announced a $4 million push behind the ad. President Trump advised him to “keep it up” by giving it more TV time. Vice President JD Vance dismissed objections from fellow Republicans as “whining.”

Vance added to the contemptible attack on Action by saying at a rally earlier this month that she is a “crazy person,” and possibly a drunk. Here is Vance: “I did promise Amy that I would meet her at a bar later. I understand she is into that kind of thing.”

Child abuse has been a dark recurring issue in these midterms. The Ramaswamy episode comes as Republicans in Ohio are spending millions to reelect Rep. Max Miller (R). His former wife has accused him of abusing her and their young daughter. The child’s grandfather, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), has called Miller unfit to serve and demanded his resignation. Yet the Republican-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund has booked more than $5 million in television advertising in the race .

In a 1993 essay, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy downward.” President Trump with his infamous claim to grab women by the genitals and involvement with a porn actress has accelerated that downward spiral, lowering the bar for wretched political discourse to new nadirs.

Ramaswamy once sent me an angry email after I criticized him in this column for playing racial politics. The column focused on his statement: “I’m sure the boogeyman white supremacists exist somewhere in America. I have just never met him. Never seen one.”

I said he was recklessly pretending there was no more white racism in order to win over white voters. Now Ramaswamy’s offensive attack on Acton makes his earlier lowbrow racist tactics look like nothing. We have sunk far below them.

This is the age of get-in-the-gutter politics.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “ New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement . “