As the midterm polls got bleaker, Trump and his allies acted out more and more in desperation. That’s how I choose to understand the ad that Republican gubernatorial nominee in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, released on Oct. 19 about his opponent, Democrat Amy Acton.
That ad—and even more so, the defenses of it from Ramaswamy himself as well as Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump—mark a new low in the seemingly endless downward moral spiral of the MAGA movement. I’m hardly the only person to be arguing this—it seems that every pundit I follow and respect published a column condemning the ad and the decision of the Ramaswamy campaign and the Trump administration to embrace and champion it.
I don’t merely want to do the same. Unlike some of those well-meaning pundits, I don’t believe the cause of righteousness in the world is vindicated or advanced by fulsome proclamations in defense of virtue and equally earnest denunciations of evil. Sermons only make things better when they are heard by a persuadable audience. I’m not convinced the people who need to undergo what Plato called a “turning around of the soul” (periagōgē) are reachable by moralistic appeals to Right and Wrong. In that respect, I think MAGA already resides far beyond good and evil, in a world of might makes right—and where the end (victory over the Enemy) justifies an ever-lengthening list of morally repulsive means.
In what follows, I will explore the political logic of this way of thinking about means and ends—and explain why a GOP humiliation on Election Day won’t demonstrate that Republican voters are repudiating such tactics. I will nonetheless lay out the case for cautious optimism about the potentially positive consequences of a MAGA bloodbath in the midterms—and even more so in the presidential election of 2028.
