What did Donald Trump do today?

He took exactly the position on the rape and sexual abuse of a child you'd expect him to.

In an essay-long post to his social media, Trump endorsed a notorious ad run by Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. In the ad, Donna Arthur—the mother of Ramaswamy's Democratic opponent, Amy Acton—accuses her daughter of being a liar.

What Ramaswamy's ad doesn't mention is that Acton was raped by her stepfather as a young child, after which her mother lost custody of her. The two have been estranged Acton was 12. The stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was indicted in 1978 for rape but fled the state with Acton's mother, who was also charged. He had also been indicted for incest for sexual assaults against a daughter from a previous marriage. Cledith and Donna Arthur eluded warrants and remained married until his death in 2005.

In addition to court records and a long history of public comments about her upbringing supporting Acton's claims, her brother has also corroborated her account of sexual abuse and mistreatment by their mother:

It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point. 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. This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core—a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.

Prominent Ohio Republicans have reacted with disgust and horror over Ramaswamy's decision to run the ad. Gov. Mike DeWine called it "deeply, deeply troubling" and "wrong." Senate candidate Jon Husted distanced himself as well. The archconservative National Review was one of the first outlets to confirm Acton's account and followed it with a blistering editorial calling the ad a "revolting" and "staggering act of bad taste" and Ramaswamy "an insincere and unlikable weasel."

In a shocking reversal, the conservative Columbus Dispatch editorial board pulled their endorsement of Ramaswamy over the ad and endorsed Acton instead.

Most revolting and unsettling is a new “October surprise” ad created by Ramaswamy's campaign and posted on social media. In it, Acton’s estranged mother calls her claims of childhood poverty and sex abuse lies. It should go without saying that sexual violence against children should not be politicized or taken as lightly as Ramaswamy appears to take it. 

It's possible Trump genuinely believes that Ramaswamy's ad will be effective in painting Acton—and not the mother who stayed with her 12-year-old daughter's rapist and lost custody as a result—as a liar.

But Trump also has good reasons to want people to dismiss the testimony of sexually abused children in general. More than once, in front of witnesses, he has made "jokes" about young children that he'd be "dating" when they got older. He's been accused by underage girls who were contestants in his Miss Teen USA beauty pageant of peeping on them in dressing rooms, using his status as the pageant owner as an excuse. (Trump has admitted to doing just that when it was adult contestants.) He's indulged in sexual banter about his own daughter with radio shock jock Howard Stern, one of many times he's made sexually objectifying comments about Ivanka Trump's body.

And while he hasn't been conclusively tied to the child sex trafficking ring run by his longtime friend Jeffrey Epstein, he has made a point of bribing Epstein's co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell with relatively luxurious "Club Fed" prison accommodations. Trump famously wrote Epstein a poem about "certain things" they had "in common" that "never age," set inside the silhouette of a pubescent girl.

 

 

Why does this matter?

• It matters that there is absolutely nothing surprising at all about Donald Trump attacking a woman for being the victim of child sexual abuse.