Op-Ed: Ramaswamy Is Misreading Things

Vivek Ramaswamy's latest TV ad raises an important question for him and other GOP candidates, writes Jonathan Martin at Politico. "Can anybody besides Trump pull off this sort of low-down stunt?" Martin suggests the answer is no. The Ohio gubernatorial candidate put the estranged mother of opponent Amy Acton on camera to call her daughter a liar, the same woman who once stood by a husband indicted for molesting Acton as a girl. "Ramaswamy's bet is that Donald Trump has fundamentally transformed politics and the old rules no longer apply," writes Martin. We may not fully know whether that assumption is correct for years, but Martin suggests that Trump is "singular," and that imitators such as Ramaswamy will fail.

Trump has largely been "judged as a celebrity rather than a conventional politician, a grace that, along with his stand-up timing and absurdities, dulled the blade and brought a sort of it's-just-Trump alibi," he writes. When others, from Ramaswamy to Kari Lake to JD Vance, try to replicate, it never seems to work. "Voters want something better, and they're about to make that clear, in Ohio and beyond, next month," writes Martin. Read the full column.