Midterm elections are rarely favorable to the sitting president’s party, but the GOP didn’t have to lose this badly. Trump and “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth didn’t have to start the war in Iran—the purpose of which they never quite bothered to explain—by bombing a girls’ school. Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick didn’t have to levy a haphazard array of tariffs that seemed almost consciously designed to punish states with competitive Senate elections. Trump didn’t have to sic men like former border-patrol commander and SS cosplayer Gregory Bovino on Midwestern cities.
Nowhere was the GOP crackup more evident than in Ohio. In the Buckeye State’s highest-profile races, the most prominent issues were domestic violence, tariffs, AI data centers, and war. Remarkably, regarding all these issues, the Republican position seemed to be pro. Gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s TV spot accusing his opponent Amy Acton of lying about the rape she suffered as a child will likely be remembered as the vilest political advertisement of the Trump era. In Ohio’s seventh congressional district, the GOP campaign apparatus quietly maintained its support for Rep. Max Miller, a man very credibly accused of assaulting his ex-wife and daughter—who are also, as it happens, the daughter and granddaughter of sitting GOP senator Bernie Moreno.
Ohio, too, was ground zero of the anti-AI backlash, with more than half of the nation’s total local ballot measures restricting data-center construction. None of the twenty-one proposed data centers were approved, despite Trump traveling to Vandalia, Ohio, to make the case for rebranding AI as “super intelligence.” It probably didn’t help that Sen. Jon Husted, appointed to take J. D. Vance’s seat, was a key player in facilitating generous tax breaks for the industry while serving as Ohio’s lieutenant governor. In August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent tech-industry allies a memo, leaked to Axios, warning that should Husted lose, “elected officials everywhere will treat Ohio as their reason to work against data centers in the future.” One can only hope the NRSC will prove prophetic.
Husted struggled to hone his message against former senator Sherrod Brown, a populist fixture of Ohio politics for the past half century. Brown’s campaign message practically wrote itself: My opponent supports the war that is driving up gas prices, the data centers that are driving up electricity prices, and the tariffs that are crushing Ohio manufacturing. Trump won Ohio by eleven points in 2024, and Republican donors spent half a billion dollars on advertising alone this cycle, including eye-popping expenditures from Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and the crypto industry. But for Brown, flipping a Senate seat was ultimately rather simple: as elsewhere, Democrats won in Ohio with ease on Tuesday because of the Trump-era GOP’s myriad own-goals on policy.
But Ohio highlights another unmistakable trend: voters have grown tired of the kinds of people MAGA forces us to pay attention to. With the three most prominent candidates on the Ohio Republican slate—Husted, Ramaswamy, and Miller—we encounter three representative archetypes of Trump’s GOP. The Republican candidate slate in Ohio reveals how MAGA has become, at the elite level, a project of lightweights, entrepreneurs, and predators.
Garry Wills once suggested that Barry Goldwater declined to run for president in 1968 because he was at once startlingly aware of his own deficiencies and genuinely patriotic: “He loved his country too much to see it put in the hands of a lightweight.” Among today’s conservative lightweights, such patriotism is tragically rare. Trump has given immense responsibility to painfully lackluster individuals, some of whom seem, deep down, aware of their own inadequacy. Notable MAGA empty suits include outgoing Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin.
But Jon Husted may be the lightest of them all. He speaks with a kind of bluster, but there’s an unmistakable air of sheepish fear about him, like a student-athlete getting cold-called in front of the whole class. As it happens, Husted was a student-athlete: his biggest applause line at rallies would come when he reminded audiences that he played football for the University of Dayton (“Go Flyers!”). During the home stretch of the campaign, he took to carrying a football with him up to the microphone, presumably for emotional support. One wonders whether Trump’s unusual fixation on Husted’s “great ass” is because the president couldn’t come up with anything else to say about him.
Meanwhile, for the entrepreneurs, the Trump project has been little more than a smart bet. In this camp, one finds many intelligent cynics, both professional investors such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, as well as political entrepreneurs such as J. D. Vance. What is Hillbilly Elegy if not a pitch to potential investors in Vance’s political brand?
Vivek Ramaswamy, an old friend of Vance’s from Yale Law School, is a professional investor who became a MAGA political entrepreneur. After interning at Goldman Sachs and working for a hedge fund, Ramaswamy launched the biotech start-up Roivant Sciences, which counted among its early successes a pump-and-dump scheme involving a failed Alzheimer’s drug. Ramaswamy is, at heart, a libertarian finance guy, always looking for the next edge. (As a Harvard undergraduate, he performed “free-market-themed rap songs” under the moniker Da Vek.) Seeing money to be made in the backlash to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing, Vivek pivoted away from biotech and attempted to launch an “anti-woke” alternative to asset-management firms like BlackRock. His unconscionable attack ad was the act of a man taught by the hedge-fund world to excuse shameful behavior as “exploiting market inefficiencies.”
Finally, among the most disturbing things about the Trump GOP is the pride of place it gives to predators: men—Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Matt Gaetz—accused of sexual assault. The allegations against Max Miller may be the worst of them all: his ex-wife reports that Miller held a gun to her head, burned her chest with hot water from a skillet, and broke the collarbone of their two-year-old daughter. Even Trump knew the guy was a political liability and told him he might struggle to defend his deep-red House district. But Miller refused to stand aside. “Miller was resolute,” the Times reported, “that he would do what the president himself had done when faced with personal scandals seen as fatal to his presidential campaigns: stay in and fight.” Trump has committed so many crimes so openly that MAGA can’t—and frequently doesn’t want to—discipline subordinates whose personal transgressions threaten MAGA’s long-term success. If you can do it, Dad, why can’t I?
Trump does not, it turns out, tend to surround himself with the best. The problem is endemic to his mafioso political style. By treating the state like a corrupt family business and elevating those most eager to do his dirty work, Trump created a movement whose most important lieutenants are sycophants, snakes, and creeps. On Tuesday, most Ohioans—and most Americans—signaled that they were sick of those kinds of people. How could you not be?
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