Take Care of Your Family First

Start with the record, because the record is older than anyone's campaign. On July 14, 1978, police in Austintown, Ohio, outside Youngstown, arrested a man named Cledith Arthur, called Bud, for the rape of a 12-year-old girl. He pleaded not guilty four days later. A Mahoning County grand jury indicted him that September. On October 26 he missed a court date and was declared a fugitive, and a warrant went out for him, and then at least one more over the years that followed, and none of them were ever served, because he and his wife had left Ohio for Pennsylvania, where he lived until he died in 2004. The girl was his stepdaughter. Her name is Amy Acton. She and her younger brother were removed from the Arthurs' custody after the arrest and raised by their father, and in 2019, a year before the pandemic made her the most recognizable public health official in the state, she told the Youngstown Vindicator that the day at the courthouse was the last time she ever saw her mother. "That was the last time I ever saw her." She has also said, for years, that between the ages of nine and 12 she lived in "18 or so" places, one of them a tent, and that the abuse ran from nine until the arrest. Her brother, Philip Stearns, who was there, put the rest of it in one sentence this week: "After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy's rapist until he died." She had married him in 1975, after he had already been indicted once, in an earlier case, for incest. Bud Arthur was never convicted; he fled instead. The paper will use the brother's word and let the reader decide whether a man who jumps bond on a child-rape indictment and spends 26 years in another state has earned a gentler one.

Now the video. It surfaced Monday night, October 19, on a Substack run by an Ohio political blogger who calls himself the Rooster, who got it from a voter who had been shown it inside an online poll and recorded the screen, which is to say it was being tested, and within hours it was everywhere a Republican voter in Ohio might look. It is a little over a minute long. The woman on camera is Donna Arthur, Bud Arthur's widow. "It's not easy for a mother to say this," she says, "but Amy was a serious problem." Then: "She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She's lied her entire life." Then: "Don't vote for people who lie." And, about what will happen to Ohio if her daughter wins: "It will only get worse." The video has no disclosure line, which Ohio requires on paid political advertising, so it does not say who paid for it, who produced it, or whether Mrs. Arthur was compensated for her time. Donald Trump Jr. posted it to his followers with the caption "Ohio watch this and think about what it means." Laura Loomer pushed it. Dinesh D'Souza pushed it. Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State, pushed it. The paper has watched it and has thought about what it means, as instructed, and will get to that.

The man it was made for is Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Governor of Ohio, and on Tuesday his campaign was asked the only question that mattered, which was whether it paid for the thing. Here is the entire answer, from his spokeswoman, Connie Luck: "We don't know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020, but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor." Read it twice. It does not say the campaign didn't pay for the video. It does not say the campaign disapproves of the video. It does not say the campaign will ask its allies to stop circulating the video. It says the campaign doesn't know what happened between a woman and her daughter, which is a remarkable sentence to issue on a day when the Mahoning County court file was being read aloud on every newscast in the state, and then it calls the 12-year-old in that file a fabulist. That was the morning. By evening, at a town hall at CrossPointe Church in Westerville, Mr. Ramaswamy had stopped pretending: "It is an ad from our campaign," he said, and people close to the campaign told reporters it had tested well with persuadable voters, and that it would spend $4 million putting it on television and streaming across the state, starting that night. He said he "would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans," and that the ad was an answer to Dr. Acton "spreading some defamatory, disparaging lies" about him and his family. His campaign says Mrs. Arthur was not paid. He would not say who wrote her script. And somewhere in the middle of all this a man in the church stood up and started shouting about Amy Acton's mother, and kept shouting, until a police officer walked him out, which is the one part of Tuesday the paper would have liked to see on television. So the sequence of the day was: a non-denial addressed to a child in the morning, a heckler removed by police in the evening, and a $4 million purchase order by dark.

It is also not the first time. On April 14 of this year Mr. Ramaswamy posted a campaign video to X, captioned "The government we elect is the government we deserve," that closed with this line about his opponent: "a positive vision for our state versus a governor who has none at all other than to complain about what someone else did to her." That is the Republican nominee for Governor, on his own account, describing a woman's account of being raped at 12 as complaining. It came one day after her campaign had asked his allies to stop attacking her for having sought treatment for it. Acton's campaign manager, Phil Stein, said at the time: "It is shameful that Ramaswamy's allies are attacking someone for seeking treatment after being sexually abused as a child." Mr. Ramaswamy did not respond to that, either. So the chronology of the last six months is: his people attack her for getting therapy; he calls the rape complaining; and then, three weeks before the election, seven points down in the Marist poll and falling on the prediction markets from 30 percent Tuesday morning to 22 by dinner, the rapist's widow appears on camera to call her a liar, and his campaign, asked whether it paid for that, calls her a fabulist, and then he says it was his, and buys the airtime. Dr. Acton's own words, on Tuesday, were these: "Between the ages of 10 and 12, I was sexually abused by her husband, while my birth mother did nothing to protect me." Of the woman in the video she said it was "awful to see her this way," and that her mother is "clearly not well." The paper has read a lot of candidates' responses to attack ads. This is the first one it has seen that forgave the person on camera and not the person who paid her airtime.

The paper's readers will have met this man before, because this is what he does. In November 2023, on a debate stage in Miami, he was asked how he could propose banning TikTok while using it himself, and he turned to Nikki Haley and said: "In the last debate she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok, while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first before preaching to anybody else." Haley's daughter was 25 at the time, and the paper notes that so no one else has to; she was not a candidate for anything. "Leave my daughter out of your voice," Haley said. "You're just scum." The audience booed him. His campaign sold "Rebel Scum" T-shirts off it. Three months before that, in Iowa, he called Representative Ayanna Pressley, who is Black, a "modern grand wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, and when the Congressional Black Caucus objected he said, "I stand by what I said." In December 2023 he announced from a debate stage that January 6 "now does look like it was an inside job." The Atlantic reported that he had wondered aloud whether federal agents were on the planes on September 11, and he said the reporter made it up. On the day after Christmas in 2024 he explained to the country, by name, which sitcom characters of the 1990s had made American children too mediocre to hire, which is the closest he has come to an insult that cost him something: he was gone from the Department of Government Efficiency within a month, and the account of why, from people who were in the room, is that Elon Musk wanted him gone and the post was the last straw. He is a man whose one reliable political talent is finding the softest part of another person and pressing on it in public, and the only thing new about this week is that the softest part was a 12-year-old and he found her mother to do the pressing.

So the paper asks what it always asks, which is who chose him. The President endorsed him on the night he announced, in February 2025. The Vice President, who is from Ohio and who Mr. Ramaswamy is openly trying to become, directed his own political team to steer the campaign. The Ohio Republican Party endorsed him in May 2025 over the objection of the sitting Governor, Mike DeWine, who worked the room to stop it and lost. And then, on January 7 of this year, Governor DeWine endorsed him anyway, citing "economic momentum." The paper mentions Governor DeWine because Amy Acton was his health director. She stood next to him at the podium every afternoon in the spring of 2020, and when men with rifles walked her street in Bexley that May he told them from the podium to come after him instead, and as of this writing, a day after a video of her abuser's widow calling her a liar was pushed out by the President's son, Governor DeWine has said nothing. One member of his cabinet has. Lydia Mihalik, his development director, a Republican, said, "There are lines we shouldn't cross, and this is one of them." Senator Jon Husted, who is on the same ballot and was asked by his opponent, Sherrod Brown, to condemn the video, has not. The paper would like the record to show which Republicans in Ohio could find the line this week. It is a short list and the Governor is not on it.

Here is what the paper has been thinking about, since Donald Trump Jr. asked. This is the party that chose "protect the children" as its brand. It has run on it for a decade: the groomers, the drag queens, the library books, the Epstein files that the deep state was hiding and that only this party would release. So the paper went and looked at what this party actually does when the man who hurt a child is one of its own, and the answer is in the public record and it is not complicated.

The Epstein files first, because the party made them the test. In May 2025 the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and her deputy, Todd Blanche, went to the White House and told the President that his name was in the files. That is the Wall Street Journal's reporting and the White House, after calling it fake news for a day, stopped denying it. On July 7 the department issued a two-page memo saying there was no client list and no basis to investigate anyone further. Congress then passed a law forcing the files out, all of them, and the department released three million pages in January and told Congress in February that it was done, with a list of more than 300 prominent names attached and no explanation of what any of them had done. It was not done. By the department's own accounting it has released about 3.5 million pages and is still holding another 2.5 million, for reasons that include some the law allows, like the privacy of victims, and some it does not, like the privacy of the department. In June a federal judge, Emmet Sullivan, found that the department had likely broken the law and ordered it to release the rest or explain itself, and in July Mr. Blanche's answer was that "the Court should not order the Department to take further action." And the redactions, when people with clearance got to look behind them, turned out to have a shape. Two congressmen, Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, read the unredacted files in February and came out with six names of wealthy men that had been blacked out for, in Khanna's phrase, "no apparent reason," one of them Leslie Wexner; the department un-blacked 16 names off one list of 20 the following week. CNN found the President's name redacted in one copy of a document and visible in another. And the House Oversight Democrats found that of 15 documents the government had given Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyers about a woman who told the FBI the President had assaulted her when she was a minor, the public release contained six, and that three FBI interview reports and the agents' notes, more than fifty pages, were simply not there. The department said they were duplicates. It published the three reports in March, after the shouting, and 37 pages of the notes are still missing. The woman's allegation is uncorroborated and the President denies it, and the paper is not repeating it as fact; it is reporting that the Justice Department, ordered by Congress to release everything, found those particular pages and set them aside. As of this month the number of people charged with anything on the strength of those three million pages is zero. Mr. Blanche, who is now the Attorney General, explained it this way: "There's a lot of horrible photographs that appear to be taken by Mr. Epstein or by people around him. That doesn't allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody." The President, for his part, is suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over a birthday letter to Epstein that his lawyers first called nonexistent and that the estate then produced. A judge threw the suit out in April; he refiled in May. That is the whole of the party's accountability on the one child-abuse case it swore it cared about: a briefing, a memo, a document dump, a lawsuit, and nobody in handcuffs.

Then the roll call. Matt Gaetz: the House Ethics Committee found, in December 2024, "substantial evidence" that he had sex with a 17-year-old in 2017 and paid her $400 for it. The Justice Department had closed its investigation without charges the year before, and the paper notes for fairness that it was a Democratic Justice Department that did so. The President's response to all of it was to nominate him for Attorney General of the United States, in November 2024, while the committee was finishing that report; Mr. Gaetz withdrew eight days later, before any senator could ask him about the 17-year-old. Dennis Hastert: the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House in history died on October 3, at home, in hospice, at 84. Prosecutors said he had sexually abused at least four boys he coached in wrestling between 1965 and 1981, one of them 14, in a motel room. He was never charged with any of it, because by the time anyone looked the clock had run out, so he went to prison for 15 months for the way he structured the hush money, and the judge who sentenced him called him a "serial child molester" from the bench, and he came home and lived nearly another decade, and the paper looked this month for a word about him from the party he led for eight years and did not find one. Robert Morris: the founder of Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, one of the largest congregations in the country, sat on the President's Evangelical Executive Advisory Board in 2016 and hosted him at the church in 2020. In October 2025 he pleaded guilty in Oklahoma to five felony counts of lewd acts with a child, a girl named Cindy Clemishire whom he began abusing in 1982 when she was 12. He got a ten-year sentence of which he will serve six months, in a county jail. And Larry Craig, because the paper wants to be precise about what this party is actually capable of being ashamed of. In 2007 a Republican senator from Idaho was arrested in a Minneapolis airport men's room, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, announced his resignation, and then un-announced it and served out his term. That was the loudest spasm of sexual shame the party had managed in a generation, and it was over a grown man and a shoe, and even he got to finish.

Put the two halves together. A 12-year-old is raped in a suburb of Youngstown, her abuser runs, her mother runs with him, and 48 years later the party that cannot find a single prosecutable man in three million pages of Epstein files, that nominated Mr. Gaetz for Attorney General, that buried Mr. Hastert without a word and that got Pastor Morris six months in a county jail, finds the one person on earth willing to call the 12-year-old a liar, and puts her on camera, and the candidate it chose pays $4 million to make sure you see it. The paper has thought about what it means, as Mr. Trump's son asked. It means the children this party protects are hypothetical, and the ones it will throw to the dogs are real and have names, and the difference between the two categories is whether protecting them costs a Republican anything.

The paper said on Sunday, when it endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, that it did not expect to make a habit of endorsing. On Monday, when it endorsed Angie Nixon, it said two days is not a habit. Three days is. The paper retracts the disclaimer. It has been told, since it opened, that a paper that rates clowns should not pick candidates, and it took the advice for two months, and it has concluded that the advice was a way of saying that a paper should watch what is happening in Ohio and say nothing, and it declines. The paper is in the endorsement business now, for the candidates who would want it and the ones who would rather it kept quiet alike, and it will say who it is for every time it has a reason.

It has a reason. The Daily Buffoon endorses Amy Acton for Governor of Ohio. Not narrowly, not with a reservation held back for a later column, and not only because of who she is running against, although that would be enough. She is the doctor who ran the state's response to the pandemic in the spring of 2020 and made every call in public, next to a Republican Governor, while men with rifles stood outside her house; she is a woman who has told the truth about her childhood in the same words since before she had any reason to, and who has a court file from 1978 to back every word of it; and she is leading, in a state the President carried by eleven points, a man with $97 million of television behind him and the Vice President's political operation at his back, because Ohio has had a year to look at him. The paper would be for her if she were down twenty. It will not pretend that she isn't the better candidate because it dislikes her opponent, and it will not pretend that disliking him isn't part of it. He put a rapist's widow on camera to call a child a liar, and paid to broadcast it, and his party chose him, and the paper is in the business, as of today, of saying so and naming the alternative. Dr. Acton's running mate is David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, and the paper is for him too. The election is November 3.

So, the clowns. The paper has never been in doubt about this one. There is a fifth clown on the rating row, and the paper has spent two months explaining, piece after piece, that it is held in reserve for something, and here it is. Five clowns, the first five the paper has ever given a man it had not previously rated, for a candidate for Governor who called a child's rape complaining in April, who was handed the chance on Tuesday morning to say he had nothing to do with her mother's video and called her a fabulist instead, and who by Tuesday night had said the video was his and bought $4 million of airtime for it. The paper has used his own words for the headline. In November 2023 Mr. Ramaswamy told a woman on a stage that she might want to take care of her family first before preaching to anybody else. Amy Acton's family took care of her at twelve, which is why she is alive to run. The paper has no idea what Mr. Ramaswamy's family thinks of what he did this week, and would not ask; that is his line, not the paper's. It would just like him to know, on the way out, that the people of Ohio have the court file now, and they can read.