Ramaswamy accuses Acton of ‘lying’ about attack ad, but court records contradict claim made by Acton’s mother in ad
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Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, accused his Democratic opponent, Dr Amy Acton, of “lying about lying” in her outraged response to an attack ad released by his campaign.
“We ran an ad about lying,” Ramaswamy argued on Friday, “it had nothing to do with childhood abuse”. Instead, the Republican claimed, his opponent was lying “about her history”.
The Ramaswamy campaign ad features Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, accusing the daughter she lost custody of in 1978, after her second husband was charged with raping her then 12-year-old daughter, of lying about her childhood.
According to police and court documents obtained by the Associated Press, Arthur’s second husband, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter in July 1978, after Acton’s biological father reported him to authorities. The abuse allegedly happened from December 1976 to April 1978, when Acton was between 10 and 12 years old.
Cledith Arthur pleaded not guilty and was indicted by a grand jury that September, but failed to show at a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981. Donna Arthur fled the state with her husband, who later died.
Philip Stearns, Acton’s brother, said in a statement denouncing the ad that after his stepfather was arrested “and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.”
In the attack ad, Donna Arthur called her daughter “a liar” and said “she lies about her past; she says she grew up living in a tent, none of that is true.” That part of the ad uses stock video of a tent that had previously appeared in a biographical ad from Acton’s campaign, in which the candidate described her troubled upbringing. “I think it was somewhere off Route 7,” the candidate recalls. “I was 12, and we were living in a tent.”
A copy of the 1978 arrest warrant for Cledith Arthur, posted online on Friday by Nick Evans, a reporter for the Ohio Capital Journal, suggests that Acton was telling the truth. The warrant lists a campground off Ohio Route 7 in Rogers, Ohio as Cledith Arthur’s address.
“In 1982, after the Arthurs had skipped bail and fled Ohio, a deputy attempted to serve a warrant at” the same campground, Evans reports. “In a hand written note, the deputy relays that the park’s manager said Arthur ‘has not camped here for over two years.’”
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Saturday. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump started his day by lashing out at a female White House correspondent who asked him “Do the sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to you, sir?”, as the president refused to admit that the credibility of a woman featured in Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack ad was fatally undermined by the fact that she sided with the man charged with raping her 12-year-old daughter.
Democrat Mary Peltola, the former Alaska congresswoman running for Senate against the incumbent Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, and an independent candidate named Daniel Sullivan, told MS Now that the justice department lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s results if the Republican incumbent loses “is clearly corruption.”
Ramaswamy accused Acton, of “lying about lying” in her outraged response to the attack ad released by his campaign. But a copy of the 1978 arrest warrant for Cledith Arthur, Acton’s then-stepfather, suggests that Acton was telling the truth.
After lashing out at a reporter who pressed him on ignoring sexual abuse, Trump ends his day with a softball question from a friendly outlet
Donald Trump started his day by lashing out at a female White House correspondent who asked him “Do the sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to you, sir?”, as the president refused to admit that the credibility of a woman featured in Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack ad was fatally undermined by the fact that she sided with the man charged with raping her 12-year-old daughter.
Trump insisted that the ad, in which the mother of Dr Amy Acton, a Democrat running for Ohio governor, called her estranged daughter a liar, was valid, even though Acton’s mother had lost custody of her children in 1978, when her second husband was charged with raping her daughter.
“A mother is saying, ‘Don’t put my daughter there because she’s a terrible person and she’s a liar’. Why shouldn’t somebody use that?” Trump said.
“But do the sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to you, sir?” Monica Alba of NBC News asked.
As he tried to ignore her and press on with his point that the ad was damning, Alba repeated: “But do sexual abuse allegations make no difference?
“Wait, wait, wait, wait. Slow down. Who are you with? Who you with?” Trump asked.
After Alba identified her network and Trump criticized it, she said again: “But there are very serious sexual abuse allegations.”
“Quiet,” Trump said.
“They make no difference to you?” Alba asked again.
“Isn’t she a fresh person?” Trump asked another reporter, before turning to Alba and saying: “You’re a horrible little reporter, aren’t you?”
After pressing ahead with his talking point that the observations of a mother must be valuable, Trump turned back to Alba and asked: “Why wouldn’t you listen to a mother that says that? Why wouldn’t you listen, Miss NBC?”
“She stayed with a stepfather-” Alba began.
“Wait a minute, quiet,” Trump said. “I don’t know anything about a stepfather.”
Alba continued: “who was charged with raping his stepdaughter in 1978, sir.”
“You just keep talking,” Trump told her.
“I am answering you, sir.,” she replied.
“I don’t know anything about stepfathers,” the president repeated and then reiterated that the allegation of sexual abuse did, in fact, mean nothing to him.
That evening, instead of taking questions from nonpartisan outlets, Trump limited his last exchange of the day to a single softball question from a reporter from the rightwing news channel Real America’s Voice, who told the president his rally was fun and then asked him to trash FBI officials his administration accuses of helping suppress reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.
Peltola calls federal lawsuit to block Alaska results should she win ‘a very desperate attempt to cling to power’
Democrat Mary Peltola, the former Alaska congresswoman running for Senate against the incumbent Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, and an independent candidate named Daniel Sullivan, told MS Now on Friday that the justice department lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s results if the Republican incumbent loses “is clearly corruption.”
The federal intervention Donald Trump says he ordered, on the premise that some voters might mistakenly vote for the wrong Dan Sullivan, “is not playing well with Alaskans at all,” Peltola said.
“It’s sending a message that Dan Sullivan does not believe that Alaskans are sophisticated enough to know exactly who they’re voting for and what the implications of their vote is,” she added. “I mean, Alaskans are very dialed into this race because 24 hours a day, the Pacs are running ads and attack ads. So there’s no room for anybody to not be thinking about this Senate race.”
“This is clearly a very desperate attempt to cling to power,” Peltola said of her Trump-endorsed Republican rival, “using his allies in Washington, DC to rig the system even further.”
Peltola also noted that the ballot in Alaska’s Senate race clearly “says incumbent” next to Dan Sullivan’s name, “so there just isn’t much room for confusion on the ballot.”
Because Alaska uses a ranked-choice voting system, any voters who are confused as to which Dan or Daniel Sullivan they want in office, could simply rank both of them and no other candidate.
Peltola was interviewed by the host Nicole Wallace, a former communications director in George W Bush’s White House who, as a senior adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008, tried to convince Americans that Sarah Palin was ready to be president.
“I’ve spent a little bit of time in Alaska,” Wallace noted at the start of the interview, causing Peltola to chuckle.
“I feel remorse for my role in the final weeks of the McCain-Palin effort,” Wallace said in 2020, “that I was part of an effort to suggest in interviews and otherwise that she was ready to be president if she had to step in to that role.”
Abdul El-Sayed to run new ad on Fox News and Newsmax filled with praise for him from Fox News and Newsmax hosts
Dr Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat battling a Republican opponent and rightwing media for a seat in the US Senate, announced on Friday that he is buying ad time on Fox News and Newsmax to run a new ad filled with praise for him from Fox News and Newsmax hosts.
At the start of the ad, El-Sayed tells voters who get their news from the rightwing outlets: “We agree on a lot: Washington is a corrupt swamp; the big corporations and elites run the show there, and it raises our costs; release the Epstein files; and yeah, free speech is under attack, and we should Make America Healthy Again, stop wasting our tax dollars on overseas wars and end bad trade deals.”
Then he introduces a package of clips from the rightwing hosts and podcasters by saying, “Don’t want to take my word for it? How about some folks you know a little bit better?”
The ad then cuts together grudging and genuine praise for the Democrat from: the Fox hosts Jesse Waters, Ainsley Earhardt, Jessica Tarlov and Lara Trump; Newsmax host Lidia Curanaj; Saagar Enjeti on Tucker Carlson’s podcast and former Republican congresswoman-turned-podcaster Nancy Mace.
‘We’ll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran’, Trump tells Florida crowd
Donald Trump casually hinted at likely US military action against Cuba during a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Florida on Friday.
About midway through his 90 minute speech, as he described the toll inflicted on Iran by the Pentagon, Trump’s remarks were interrupted by a supporter shouting “What about Cuba?”
“He wants to know what about Cuba. Give me a break,” Trump said. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran. We’ll just- we’ll do a little stopover”.
“Actually, what we’re going to do with Cuba is we’re going to come back from Iran,” Trump went on, making a swerving gesture with his hand. “Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast, they’ll raise up their hands and then we’re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal.”
“We’ll have Marco – Marco!” he continued. “We don’t even have to stop, we could just put him in there and he’ll figure it out.”
Trump has dropped similar hints about a US regime change operation on more than a dozen occasions this year.
Minutes after the president stopped speaking, Rubio, his secretary of state, urged Cubans to collaborate with US spies to topple their own government.
“To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba – now is the time,” Rubio posted. “The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
The top US diplomat, whose parents left Cuba for the United States before the socialist revolution there, seemed to mistakenly use the word “discrete” meaning separate, rather than “discreet” meaning private or secret.
Ramaswamy campaign staffers blame candidate for attack ad – report
Amid the bipartisan backlash against Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, for running an attack ad against his Democratic rival in the Ohio governor race, Amy Acton, which features Acton’s estranged mother, Ramaswamy campaign staffers are blaming the candidate for the ad, Axios correspondent Marc Caputo told MS Now on Friday.
“From what we understand at Axios, Ramaswamy was the one who wanted the ad and his campaign didn’t,” Caputo said. “So what they did is, they wanted to show him that it wasn’t popular. And nowadays when you test an ad, you send people an email or a text message with a copy of the ad for them to rate it. Someone saw that ad; they got polled. They screen-capped it, screen-recorded and published it online, and it just got the most negative reception I’ve seen in a very long time.”
Ramaswamy accuses Acton of ‘lying’ about attack ad, but court records contradict claim made by Acton’s mother in ad
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, accused his Democratic opponent, Dr Amy Acton, of “lying about lying” in her outraged response to an attack ad released by his campaign.
“We ran an ad about lying,” Ramaswamy argued on Friday, “it had nothing to do with childhood abuse”. Instead, the Republican claimed, his opponent was lying “about her history”.
The Ramaswamy campaign ad features Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, accusing the daughter she lost custody of in 1978, after her second husband was charged with raping her then 12-year-old daughter, of lying about her childhood.
According to police and court documents obtained by the Associated Press, Arthur’s second husband, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter in July 1978, after Acton’s biological father reported him to authorities. The abuse allegedly happened from December 1976 to April 1978, when Acton was between 10 and 12 years old.
Cledith Arthur pleaded not guilty and was indicted by a grand jury that September, but failed to show at a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981. Donna Arthur fled the state with her husband, who later died.
Philip Stearns, Acton’s brother, said in a statement denouncing the ad that after his stepfather was arrested “and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.”
In the attack ad, Donna Arthur called her daughter “a liar” and said “she lies about her past; she says she grew up living in a tent, none of that is true.” That part of the ad uses stock video of a tent that had previously appeared in a biographical ad from Acton’s campaign, in which the candidate described her troubled upbringing. “I think it was somewhere off Route 7,” the candidate recalls. “I was 12, and we were living in a tent.”
A copy of the 1978 arrest warrant for Cledith Arthur, posted online on Friday by Nick Evans, a reporter for the Ohio Capital Journal, suggests that Acton was telling the truth. The warrant lists a campground off Ohio Route 7 in Rogers, Ohio as Cledith Arthur’s address.
“In 1982, after the Arthurs had skipped bail and fled Ohio, a deputy attempted to serve a warrant at” the same campground, Evans reports. “In a hand written note, the deputy relays that the park’s manager said Arthur ‘has not camped here for over two years.’”
At Florida rally, Trump again shows CNN video on his support from Maga Republicans
Before Donald Trump finished his remarks in Florida, he took a moment to show supporters one of his favorite clips – part of a segment from CNN, in which the network’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, discussed the fact that recent polling shows Trump’s support among self-described “Maga Republicans” had only declined from 99% to 98% since 2024.
Given that Maga Republicans are people who define themselves as supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, that is perhaps unsurprising. What Trump failed to mention is that the same CNN analyst has more recently tracked the sharp decline in Trump’s support among Republicans, and the broader public.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
Donald Trump touted the justice department lawsuit that attempts to block the Senate race certification in Alaska, if the incumbent Republican that he has endorsed there loses. “I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters ahead of a campaign rally in Florida. More here
Without evidence, the president claimed that Daniel J Sullivan, the retired schoolteacher and registered Republican running against the incumbent GOP senator Daniel S Sullivan, was “put up” by Democrats to siphon the vote against the Trump-endorsed candidate. A reminder that both Sullivans (no relation to one another) will be competing against Mary Peltola, the former Democratic congresswoman, who is currently leading in many polls against the incumbent Sullivan.
Earlier, Trump doubled down on his support for Vivek Ramaswamy’s widely condemned ad that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent in the Ohio governor’s race, Amy Acton. “If my mother said bad things about me, do you think the Democrats would put it up? I think so, but my mother thought I was wonderful,” Trump said in response to Monica Alba, a reporter from NBC News.
Outside the White House on Friday, Trump scolded Alba, the reporter who followed up with questions about Acton’s childhood, and whether that changed the president’s perspective on the ad. “You’re a horrible little reporter, aren’t you?” Trump said, while continuing to ignore the myriad questions about the number of Republicans who have disavowed the ad. A reminder that Acton was removed from her mother’s care when she was 12, after her stepfather was charged with sexually abusing her. Her mother, Donna Arthur, fled the state with her husband, before his trial, and remained married to him until his death in 2004.
Susan Collins, the vulnerable Republican senator in Maine vying for a sixth term in office, said that she had secured additional tariffs exemptions on Canadian products that are crucial to her state’s agricultural industries. “Many of our farmers and growers rely on specialized equipment, packaging materials, and other products from Canada that are either unavailable from American suppliers or cannot be replaced without incurring significant expense,” Collins said in a statement.
As part of the slew of midterm campaign promises that the Trump administration has made in recent days, the president said that he will invest $250m “to hire at least 5,000 new nurses in elder care facilities all across America”, focused particularly on Florida.
This comes after the president announced $8bn financial aid package for American farmers during a campaign rally in Kansas earlier this week, and JD Vance, the vice-president, announced a $1.3bn investment in domestic fertilizer manufacturing.
Trump falsely claims that other Dan Sullivan on Alaska ballot is ‘cheating’
As we bring you the news about the justice department lawsuit against Alaska, that Donald Trump said he ordered, the president doubled down on his baseless claims that the ballot for US Senate Alaska is an attempt to confuse voters.
A reminder that there are two Dan Sullivans up for election in the pivotal race. Dan S Sullivan, the Trump-backed Republican incumbent, will face Dan J Sullivan, the retired schoolteacher who is also a registered Republican. On stage, Trump suggested again, without evidence, that this is a move orchestrated to boost Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee.
“So the Democrats maybe here they’re not so dumb … It’s cheating like hell, but it’s not the dumbest thing in the world,” Trump said.
Susan Collins announces tariff exemptions on Canadian products ahead of competitive re-election race in Maine
Susan Collins, the vulnerable Republican senator in Maine vying for a sixth term in office, said that she had secured additional tariffs exemptions on Canadian products that are crucial to her state’s agricultural industries.
“Many of our farmers and growers rely on specialized equipment, packaging materials, and other products from Canada that are either unavailable from American suppliers or cannot be replaced without incurring significant expense,” Collins said in a statement. “In my repeated conversations with ambassador [Jamieson] Greer, secretary [Howard] Lutnick, and other senior administration officials, I have asked for tariff relief for these important products.”
Collins has positioned herself as a moderate Republican, comfortable breaking with Donald Trump, and touted the millions in federal funds she’s directed back to Maine as chair of the powerful Senate appropriations committee.
Throughout campaigning the GOP incumbent has distanced herself from many of the administration’s unpopular policies – particularly in a state that Trump has lost in the past three presidential elections.
In one of the Senate debates against her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, Collins said she has been “the most outspoken opponent of the tariffs on Canada”.
“Canada is not China. It’s our neighbor and our friend,” she said.
Today, Collins said that she will “continue working directly with administration officials to seek additional relief and encourage a broader trade agreement with Canada”.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report that the administration was expected to remove 50% tariffs on some Canadian agricultural and forestry products in a bid to help Collins in the final stretch of the campaigning.
