DON'T BLAME TRUMPISM FOR THE RAMASWAMY AD

I appreciate Michelle Goldberg's outraged response to the Vivek Ramaswamy ad featuring Amy Acton's pedophile-enabling mother.

It’s quite a feat, in this numb and debased era, to create a political advertisement so shocking and indecent that people from across the political spectrum feel the need to denounce it.

But her column describes the ad as Trumpist. It isn't. Its sheer depravity is Trumpian, but it could easily have been a GOP attack from the pre-Trump era.

Goldberg says that Ramaswamy has

opened a kind of proxy debate on the right about whether a post-Trump conservatism should try to reclaim some base-line morality or continue along its current smashmouth course.

But what was the "base-line morality" of the pre-Trump Republican Party? In 1988, the outgoing president, Ronald Reagan, suggested that Mike Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee, had undisclosed mental health issues. ("Look, I'm not going to pick on an invalid," Reagan said.) Dukakis was compelled to release years of medical records, and to deny that he had any such problems. This was shortly before a Republican senator alleged that there were photographs showing Dukakis's wife, Kitty, burning an American flag as a student. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the Republican nominee, George H.W. Bush, later said that his running mate, Dan Quayle, “damn sure never burned the American flag.”

In 1992, Bill Clinton was accused of spying for the Russians during a trip he took to Moscow in his twenties. He and his wife were subsequently accused of dozens of murders, and of running drugs out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas.

There weren't well-funded ad campaigns based on these falsehoods, but in 2004 there was a massive ad campaign dishonestly accusing John Kerry of earning his three Vietnam Purple Hearts under false pretenses. There was also a bestselling book and a viral moment when the extent of Kerry's wounds was mocked by Republican convention attendees wearing Purple Heart Band-Aids.

Donald Trump had nothing to do with any of this. This was the Party of Reagan. (I could also wind the clock back to the time of Richard Nixon.)

During the Barack Obama era, Trump might have tried to rush to the front of the birtherism parade, but he wasn't the first to allege that Obama's birth took place in Kenya rather than Hawaii. Trump wasn't primarily responsible for rumors that Obama is a socialist, a Muslim, a homosexual, a crack user, and a fake Columbia student. He's not the one who first said that Obama's bestselling memoir Dreams from My Father was actually written by Bill Ayers, a radical ex-felon, or that Obama's real father was a communist named Frank Marshall Davis. Trump spread many of those rumors, but none originated with him.

"Denouncing the Ramaswamy ad gives conservatives a chance to try to drag their movement out of the Trumpist gutter," Goldberg writes. But in all likelihood, no one who wants to win office as a Republican in the future will denounce it. Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has condemned it, but he's in his last year in office and is 79 years old. Goldberg cites criticism from National Review and Erick Erickson, but these are media figures, not politicians.

The ad won't be widely denounced by party members, because it's in keeping with what the GOP has been for many decades. This isn't a "Trumpist gutter." It's a Republican gutter.