Opinion: I Know the Horror MAGA Vivek’s Despicable Attack Ad Is Trampling On

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty For much of her childhood and teenage years, my wife felt her mother didn’t make her children her priority.

When her mother had to make important, life-changing decisions, she always sided with her husband, my wife’s stepfather.

She wasn’t a bad woman, but she was so enamored with her new husband that she was willing to sacrifice her children’s happiness.

And I am convinced that childhood stress had a deeply profound effect on my wife’s life, and ultimately played a part in her death from cancer at the age of 59.

The only reason I am writing about this now is that my mother-in-law has also passed away.

She regretted her choices to the day she died.

Even now, I would never make the intimate details of their family trauma public.

Many American families have their own struggles; after all, they vary in degree and are all important.

In many ways, they are the story of our country.

Our families are bound by them, for better and for worse.

Unless we choose otherwise—or our laws are violated—they generally remain private.

All of which makes Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to manipulate an old woman and pry publicly inside a family’s hurt for his own political gain so despicable.

In Ramaswamy’s $4 million attack ad, Donna Arthur, the 82-year-old mother of his Democratic Party opponent in the Ohio governor’s race, Amy Acton, is filmed calling her daughter a “liar.” Arthur’s husband, Cledith Arthur, was accused of raping Acton, his stepdaughter, when she was a child.

“It’s not easy for a mother to say this,” said Arthur, “but Amy was a serious problem.