Indian Americans Don’t Owe Vivek Ramaswmy Anything — Not Our Silence, and Certainly Not Our Loyalty

During the 2024 presidential primaries, I wrote about Vivek Ramaswamy and called out what looked to me like a scammy business model dressed up as a campaign. I thought he was a salesman. I didn’t think he was cruel.

Last week settled that.

Two weeks before a governor’s race the major forecasters call a toss-up, the Ramaswamy campaign released an ad featuring Donna Arthur, the long-estranged birth mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton. In it, Arthur calls her daughter a liar, suggests she isn’t mentally well, and questions Acton’s own accounts of her childhood, including the abuse.

Acton has said that between the ages of 10 and 12 she was sexually abused by her stepfather, Arthur’s husband, and that her mother did nothing to protect her. The stepfather was indicted in 1978. Acton testified, and that courtroom is the last place she saw her mother. The children were removed from Arthur’s custody. Arthur stayed married to the man until he died in 2004. Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, has corroborated all of it.

The campaign wants you to treat Arthur as a character witness. She isn’t one. She is the adult who was supposed to protect a child and didn’t. An ad that asks Ohio voters to take her word on whether Acton can be trusted is asking them to take her side of 1978. I can’t find another way to read it.

A Week of Excuses

What bothers me even more than the ad is everything Ramaswamy has said since. Each explanation moves a little further from the thing itself.

First, the campaign wouldn’t say whether the ad was theirs. Then Ramaswamy owned it: “It is an ad from our campaign.” His spokesperson offered this: “We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother.” There is an indictment. There is a child who testified and a brother who backs her up. The campaign’s position is that it doesn’t know.

Confronted on the trail, Ramaswamy shrugged: “Politics, sometimes, it’s a tough sport. And you point out where you think your opponents are flawed.” The clip went viral with captions saying he had called an abuse survivor “flawed.” Those weren’t his exact words. But he was asked about an ad built on her abuser’s wife, and “flawed” is the word he reached for.

Then he said the ad had “nothing, nothing to do with” childhood sexual abuse. It was about her lies. Then came a new reason: Acton had attacked his mother back in the fall, a reference to her campaign’s claims about his mother’s role in his biotech company. Whatever you think of those claims, his mother is an adult professional whose work at a public company is fair game. Amy Acton was a child.

And then he put $4 million behind the ad. Ohio’s own Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said it was wrong and asked him to take it down. Ramaswamy’s response was to cut a shorter version and keep it running.

Notice what never happens in that sequence. Nobody in his campaign says the abuse didn’t happen. They just keep saying it doesn’t matter. And nobody, at any point, says sorry.

Not a Departure

It would be comforting to call the ad a lapse, a desperate move by a campaign stuck in a tight race. I don’t think it’s a lapse. I think it may be the most honest thing Vivek Ramaswamy has ever put on television.

Go back to the 2024 presidential debates. When Nikki Haley needled him for joining TikTok, he answered by bringing up her daughter’s use of the app and telling Haley she might want to take care of her family first. Haley called him scum. In that same debate, standing a few feet from the only woman on the stage, he reached for her footwear and asked voters whether they wanted “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.” A month later, he held up a handwritten sign calling her corrupt. When a woman stands in his way, he goes after her family, her shoes, her character. Acton’s mother is just the latest family member he has found a use for.

The business career has the same shape. He made his fortune in biotech, then co-founded Strive, an “anti-woke” asset management fund pitched as the answer to BlackRock, and then ran for president in a way that looked to me like the longest infomercial in Iowa history. The Daily Wire once planned a podcast around him and shelved it; its CEO said he came across as too scripted and didn’t take preparation seriously. After the campaign, he bought a 7.7 percent stake in BuzzFeed and wrote its board a letter asking it to bring in voices like Tucker Carlson’s and to apologize for its past reporting on Trump. Think about that for a second. The man who won’t apologize to an abuse survivor demanded an apology from a website.

Then came Washington. He was named co-lead of DOGE alongside Elon Musk, posted his lecture about American culture venerating mediocrity, and was out by Inauguration Day. Ohio became the soft landing, with Trump’s endorsement and more than $120 million in outside spending behind him.

I once wrote about a passage in his book Woke, Inc., in which a “lower-caste guy” who delivers Domino’s in India, and gets a tip from Ramaswamy’s family, stands as evidence that capitalism is fixing caste. I found it smug then. Reading it now, I notice how easily people turn into material in his hands, useful for a paragraph and then forgotten. Donna Arthur is useful to him for sixty seconds of airtime and the last two weeks of a campaign. After November 3, I doubt he’ll think about her, or her daughter, ever again.

The Trump Playbook

None of this is original. It’s the Trump brand of politics, and it has three rules. Belittle the women who stand in your way. Insult them at every opportunity. Never apologize.

Trump himself made sure nobody missed the lineage. On Truth Social he called it “a very powerful Ad” and Acton “a liar, and much worse.” He predicted it would go down as the ad of the decade, maybe the century. He called her defective, dishonest, and incapable, and suggested that a mother speaking about her daughter that way should disqualify the daughter from office. At a rally in Iowa he said he had told Ramaswamy to keep it up and thank God for it. Asked about the abuse, he said he had no idea. He did find time to say the mother looked very lucid. DeWine, for objecting, got called a RINO.

JD Vance, the man who once built a riff around “childless cat ladies,” told reporters he was disgusted, not by the ad, but by the Republicans complaining about it. At a rally outside Cincinnati, with Ramaswamy in the crowd, Vance praised him for having the audacity to call Acton a liar on television.

The son of immigrants from Kerala, vouching for the theory that casts his own parents as the replacement. Then came his post about American culture venerating mediocrity. The people who already resented us read it as an Indian sneering at Americans, and they haven’t forgotten.

So the president and vice president of the United States have spent a week rallying around an ad that puts an abuse survivor’s mother on camera to call her a liar. Ramaswamy hasn’t flinched, because flinching would break rule three. He has learned the playbook well. I’d almost admire the discipline if the subject weren’t a 12-year-old in a courtroom.

Believe the Mother

There’s a more uncomfortable question for our own community, and I’d be a hypocrite to skip it.

In plenty of Indian homes, a mother is beyond reproach. Family matters stay inside the family. Abuse by an uncle or a stepfather or a family friend gets buried under what will people say. Survivors in our community already run into that wall: the instinct to believe the elder, protect the family name, and treat the child who speaks up as the problem.

Ramaswamy’s ad runs on exactly that instinct. Its whole premise is that a mother’s word against her daughter settles the matter. I don’t think he made it with our aunties in mind. But the most visible Indian American politician in the country is now spending millions on the argument that when a mother and a survivor disagree, believe the mother. Some of our own kids are watching that ad. We don’t need it reinforced. We need it unlearned.

Why it Lands On All of Us

When Trump does this, it’s Trump. When Vance does it, it’s Vance. When Vivek does it, it’s an Indian doing it, and that is the problem. He runs up the tab. The bill comes to us.

When a community is small, its famous members stop being individuals and start being brochures. Nobody in Ohio decides that white people are nasty because a white candidate ran a nasty ad. Indian Americans don’t have that cushion. For a lot of Ohioans, Ramaswamy is the most famous Indian American they have ever seen on television, and what he does gets filed under all of us.

That would matter less if he had spent the last few years spending some of his fame on us. Mostly, he hasn’t. As open hostility toward Indian Americans swept through the online right, he stayed quiet, apart from one well-received speech last December against the “heritage American” crowd. Worse, he has often echoed the very ideas feeding it. In the 2024 primary he argued that racism isn’t a serious driver of inequality, pointing instead to culture and family, and he was among the first candidates to call for ending birthright citizenship, a cause the blood-and-soil right adores. 

On a debate stage in Alabama, he went further and called the great replacement theory, the white-nationalist claim that nonwhite immigrants are being brought in to replace white Americans, “a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.” The son of immigrants from Kerala, vouching for the theory that casts his own parents as the replacement. Then came his post about American culture venerating mediocrity, the prom queen over the math olympiad champ. He meant it as a pitch for skilled immigration. The people who already resented us read it as an Indian sneering at Americans, and they haven’t forgotten.

He seems to believe that if he wears the stripes thick enough, the tigers will accept him as one of their own. They won’t. They can smell a sheep. They’ve bitten him before: on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Trump told his supporters Ramaswamy was “not MAGA” and not to get duped. When he gave a fairly bland speech about the American Dream last December, the replies said, “We don’t need an Indian to tell us what the American dream is.” Someone sent me a screenshot last week of a page from one of his own books, about his grandmother’s Brahmin village in Kerala, underlined in pink and captioned as proof that heritage Indians are here to rule you. No amount of tiger-clothing covers that.

And when the tigers turn, they don’t stop at him. The nurse working nights in Columbus will hear the same thing he hears, and she had nothing to do with any of this.

What We Owe Him

Nothing, as far as I can tell. Not our silence, and certainly not our loyalty on the strength of a surname.

That may be harder for some of us than it sounds. We are a community that keeps score of firsts: the first Indian American CEO of this, the first cabinet member, the first governor of that. In Ohio, a newly formed chapter of Americans4Hindus endorsed him right away, and one community supporter told The Guardian that 70 to 80 percent of Indian Americans around Columbus were behind him. I understand the pull. When the online right is calling us invaders, it is tempting to close ranks around anyone who looks like us and made it.

But closing ranks around Ramaswamy is the brochure problem in reverse. If we defend him because he’s ours, we agree that he represents us. The only way out is the opposite: to say, plainly and in public, that a man who puts an abuse survivor’s mother on television to call her a liar does not speak for Indian Americans. Not as a partisan talking point, but as a community with its own survivors, its own silences, and its own reasons to know better.

Ohio’s Republican governor has said the ad was wrong. A Republican senator said he wouldn’t have run it. The man Ramaswamy beat in the primary is voting for Acton. It would be strange, and a little shameful, if Indian Americans turned out to be the quietest people in the room.

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Ganpy Nataraj is an entrepreneur, author of “TEXIT – A Star Alone” (thriller) and short stories. He is a moody writer writing “stuff” — Politics, Movies, Music, Sports, Satire, Food, etc.