In the first months of Donald Trump’s first term, as one moral outrage followed another, I often found myself repeating, in conversation, a seven-word phrase: Where there’s no bottom, there’s no bottom. However bad things got, they were bound to get worse. That applied above all to Trump, but also to his party, which was fusing with him.
We’ve since seen endless examples of what “no bottom” looks like. The latest is an ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio. It features the estranged mother of Ramaswamy’s opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar about her childhood and urging Ohioans not to vote for her.
Here is what we know about that childhood. In 1978, when Acton was 12, her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was indicted for raping her. He fled to Pennsylvania, where he died as a fugitive in 2004. Acton and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody, and she has not spoken with her mother since. Her mother, Donna Arthur, stayed married to the man charged with raping her daughter until he died.
Ohio’s current governor, Mike DeWine, called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling.” But the two most important Republicans in the country, Trump and Vice President Vance, defended it. Trump called it “very powerful” and wrote, “Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? . . . . This is what family values look like to Republicans in the Trump era.
As a young conservative in the 1980s . . . . I was especially shaped by George Will’s 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, which argued that statecraft is inherently “soulcraft,” the cultivation of public spirit and moral sensibilities. These thinkers shared the conviction that self-government depends on what Kristol called “republican virtue.”
They believed, too, that norms are fragile and that the membrane separating civilization from barbarism is thin. Character and conscience need to be cultivated. Public discourse either elevates or degrades, moving us away from or closer to a will-to-power ethic. The conduct of leaders, including political leaders, is educative. And when deviancy becomes widespread, we grow used to it. It was a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who coined the phrase defining deviancy down, by which he meant that a society overwhelmed by destructive behavior lowers its standards rather than confronting it.
None of this means that conservatives, or the Republican Party, were paragons of virtue.. . . . But their aspirations were ennobling, and some of them lived lives that matched their words.
Today the American right is not merely indifferent to character formation; it is in the business of character deformation. It takes pride in its transgressiveness. The Ramaswamy ad embodies the “no bottom” ethic of the Trump-era GOP, and its wickedness comes in layers.
Cruelty and coarseness have momentum, but they also have limits. Political leaders who relentlessly push brutality do lower a nation’s standards, at least for a time. But if we’re fortunate, they also awaken its conscience. The revulsion comes first, almost physical, like bile rising in the throat. . . .The reckoning follows.
The anti-MAGA reckoning may have finally begun, though much later than it should have. Trump has lost most of the country. His hold on his own base is weakening; its members, like everyone else, are suffering because of the staggering incompetence of the president. And many of those who continue to support Trump are exhausted. In Ohio, a GOP poll shows that the Ramaswamy ad is backfiring. . . . those who said they were familiar with it said it made them more likely to vote for Acton.
But Ohio alone won’t be enough. A true repudiation of the politics of savagery will require a rebuke from voters in every region of America. It should come, and in a good society it would.
The Republican Party, after all, is led by a man found liable for sexually abusing a woman and then defaming her. The president has rallied behind an ad featuring a mother who, rather than stand by her 12-year-old daughter, sided with the man charged with raping the girl. Trump mocked the murder of one critic and openly cheered the death of another. He has called his political opponents “vermin,” said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country, . . His misogyny is undisguised; so is his bigotry. As president, he has enriched himself and his family by billions of dollars. He swoons over dictators while treating Canada as an enemy. He lies and distorts reality on a scale that was once unimaginable. He incited a violent attack on the Capitol in an effort to overturn an election. The list goes on. No American president has matched Trump’s limitless corruption or his cruelty.
The election, and especially the reelection, of Donald Trump caused me, for the first time in my life, to question the fundamental decency of America. I could not understand how anyone, especially my co-religionists, could look at such a squalid figure and vote for him, let alone support him enthusiastically. . . . . Don’t honor and integrity matter? Isn’t Trump’s peculiar form of madness an obvious disqualifier?
For tens of millions of Americans—more than 77 million in 2024 alone—the answer has been no. That stain is now a permanent part of the American story. But the story isn’t over. We can move beyond this grotesque chapter to something better, though the path won’t be smooth. Even if Democrats sweep the midterms, Trump will still be president, and his closing act will likely involve trying to tear the country apart. We can’t allow him to do that.
We need to get to the other side of this era with our institutions, our bonds to one another, and our commitment to justice and the rule of law intact, and then begin the work of reclaiming American ideals. A wipeout of the party of Trump on Tuesday would be an awfully helpful step in that direction.
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