By James J. Devine
From Columbus to Detroit, Republican candidates are proving that there is nothing they won’t sink to in their pursuit of power, and every American who believes votes should decide elections, whether Democrat, Republican or independent, should take that as a warning about what may come after November’s ballots are counted.
Look at the Republican Senate and governor’s campaigns in two Midwestern states, and you’ll see a party that will say anything, smear anyone, and use anything that’s lying around, including a child’s abuse, a man’s faith and the memory of 9/11, if it might bring in votes.
A party that campaigns like this won’t suddenly find its conscience on election night.
Ohio: Turning a survivor’s trauma into an ad
In 2023, while running for president, Vivek Ramaswamy demanded the full and immediate release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. He sold himself as the man who’d stand up to the powerful predators that the establishment protects.
Then Donald Trump endorsed him for governor of Ohio, and he went quiet. His Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, called for the files’ release on July 25, 2025, and asked him to join her. He didn’t answer.
She challenged him again on Sept. 4, 2025. Still nothing. A 10TV reporter asked for his response and posted that they had “not yet heard back.”
He found his voice again when he had a chance to go after a survivor.
Acton says her stepfather sexually abused her when she was 10 to 12 years old. He was indicted in 1978 and fled before he could be convicted.
At 12, Acton testified in court. Her mother, Donna Arthur, sided with the rapist. She lost custody of her children and stayed with the rapist, who became a fugitive, until he died in 2004.
Ramaswamy’s campaign put Donna Arthur in an attack ad. The woman who stood by the man indicted for abusing her daughter now tells Ohio voters, “I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent…”
The campaign reportedly plans to spend $4 million more to air it.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said, “It’s wrong to run this ad.” Rep. Nancy Mace felt she had to add, “We are not the party of pedophilia.” Even Candace Owens—no fan of Democrats—called the ad a “major blunder” and said: “I feel like we went from tough on crime to soft on rape or something.”
The president’s view? He said he told Ramaswamy to “leave it up, and look upstairs and say, ‘Thank you, God, very much. I appreciate it.’”
Vice President JD Vance said he was “disgusted,” not by the ad but by Republicans “whining” about it.
Rogers funded Egypt, smears Michigan Muslim American
The spectacle in Michigan would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.
Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is invoking 9/11 to bury his Muslim opponent, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
On Sept. 13, 2012, while Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood governed Egypt, Rogers voted for the stopgap spending bill that kept American aid flowing to Cairo. That aid was $1.3 billion in military assistance, plus roughly $250 million in economic support, and it went to the Brotherhood’s government.
Rogers didn’t just tolerate the Brotherhood from a safe distance. He helped pay its government’s bills.
Meanwhile, the national-security establishment he helped oversee was sitting down with the Brotherhood face to face. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns met with Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party.
In August 2013, he went to Tora Prison to meet the Brotherhood’s jailed deputy leader, Khairat al-Shater, as part of U.S. mediation efforts. Ambassador Anne Patterson worked closely with Morsi’s government, so closely that critics in Cairo accused her of favoring it. None of this is fringe gossip. It’s the documented record of American diplomacy, and the Intelligence Committee chairman was in the room for the briefings.
Fast-forward to this campaign.
On CNN on Oct. 18, Rogers claimed the issue was El-Sayed’s “relationship and his family’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
He said El-Sayed’s “money comes from a group called CAIR” that “supports the Muslim Brotherhood.” The “family” claim traces back to posts a half-sister made in 2012 and 2013 about their mother.
El-Sayed was raised by his father and stepmother, not the other woman.
When a voter at a town hall asked El-Sayed whether he’d disavow the Brotherhood, he answered: “Sure, yeah, absolutely.”
Rogers then lied and told a national audience that El-Sayed “didn’t disavow” it.
PolitiFact rated that False; the video shows the answer. Rogers kept going anyway. At their Oct. 21 debate, he asked El-Sayed whether he was “for America or… for these terrorist groups overseas.” El-Sayed answered: “It’s quite beneath you.”
At the Republican convention in September, Rogers said he “never imagined that 25 years after 9/11” he’d be running against someone who campaigns with the streamer Hasan Piker. Sen. Ted Cruz, on the same stage, warned of a “red-green alliance” of “communists and Islamists.”
None of this is happening in isolation. Rep. Randy Fine has posted, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Andy Ogles has said, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”
Islamophobia isn’t a glitch in the Rogers campaign. It’s the whole operating system, and the party has made it a national platform and could just as easily be talking about Jews or Catholics, atheists or Hindus, me or you.
Look at the hypocrisy the GOP hopes no one notices.
The foreign policy establishment that funded the Muslim Brotherhood’s government, met its leaders and treated it as a legitimate partner in Cairo now demands that an American doctor prove he isn’t its agent. El-Sayed never voted for a dime of that aid. He never met al-Shater or negotiated with Morsi’s party.
Mike Rogers voted to fund that government, and the national-security apparatus he oversaw sat across the table from the terrorist group.
El-Sayed’s real “crime” is being Muslim and running for office without apologizing for it. If there’s a Brotherhood problem in this race, it isn’t in El-Sayed’s family tree. It’s in Mike Rogers’s voting record.
The pattern, and the warning
Put Ohio and Michigan side by side, and the pattern is plain. When Ramaswamy got the chance to hurt a survivor, he handed a microphone to the mother who sided with her abuser. Rogers was handed a video of his opponent disavowing the Brotherhood and called him a terrorist sympathizer anyway. And the president of the United States thanked God for the ad.
A party that will do this to win an election isn’t going to accept losing one gracefully.
We don’t have to guess.
In 2020, Trump pressed Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes.” His allies organized slates of fake electors.
Trump even incited the mob that attacked the Capitol to stop the count. The House impeached him for it, and a bipartisan majority of the Senate, including seven Republicans, voted to convict.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation found that Trump took part in a criminal conspiracy to stay in power illegally. Smith’s final report concluded that the evidence was strong enough to win and sustain a conviction at trial.
The cases ended without a verdict once Trump won back the White House, but the facts haven’t changed. Now his attorney general, Todd Blanche, has refused to pledge that federal immigration agents will stay away from polling places, which has prompted public alarm even from Republican senators like Bill Cassidy.
If Trump’s allies lose the midterms, Americans should be ready for the possibility that he’ll try to overturn the results by illegal means.
Being ready means knowing your state’s certification deadlines and who signs off on the results. It means backing your local election officials, who’ll be under pressure.
It means volunteering as a poll watcher, reporting intimidation, and making it clear that votes, not threats, decide who governs.
Anyone who would turn a child’s abuse into an ad, or a man’s faith into a charge of treason, has already shown what they’ll do when they’re losing.
Believe them, and prepare.
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