Nicolle Wallace blasted Ohio gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and other Republicans for doubling down on what she called a “despicable” campaign ad that targeted his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton. On Wednesday’s “Deadline: White House,” Wallace questioned “just how low” some Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, were willing to go.
While campaigning in Ohio on Wednesday on behalf of Ramaswamy, whom Vance said he considers a friend, the vice president defended the ad. The video features Acton’s estranged mother accusing her daughter of lying about her childhood. (When Acton was 12, she testified before a grand jury against her stepfather, who was later indicted on charges of raping her. He left the state and never went to trial. Acton’s mother remained by his side until his death in 2004.)
Vance, who represented Ohio in the Senate before becoming vice president, said he was “disgusted” by the backlash and characterized Republicans’ criticism of the ad as “whining.” On Thursday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, denounced the video and urged the Ramaswamy campaign to take it down. (He stopped short of rescinding his endorsement, however.)
By appearing with Ramaswamy and offering a full-throated defense of the video, Wallace said, Vance was “normalizing” that kind of rhetoric. “He could have canceled his appearance,” she said of Vance, “but he didn’t.”
The broader silence, and support for the ad from some Republicans, left Wallace stunned. “Just how low should we be prepared for this to go?” she asked. “And can I stop preparing myself for that? The answer is no, because if you look to Ohio’s governor’s race for the answer, it would suggest that the bottom isn’t there — that it’s truly bottomless in the MAGA Republican Party.”
The MS NOW host said she had “vowed every year” since Donald Trump first took control of the Republican Party that she would “stop being shocked and horrified,” but she confessed that Ramaswamy’s ad had resulted in just that. “This is, for me, one of the most disturbing stories that I’ve covered over the last decade, and it is very much what Trump has ushered in,” she said.
Wallace added that if there were any “gravity” in U.S. politics, Vance’s comments would be “disqualifying” and put any future presidential campaign in jeopardy. But, she said, the country was not living in “normal times.”
You can watch Wallace’s full commentary in the clip at the top of the page.
“My, how things have changed in two years,” he said Thursday on “Morning Joe.”
According to the poll, released Wednesday, likely voters preferred a Democrat to represent their congressional district over a Republican, 52% to 41%. Democrats also led Republicans on major issues, including immigration and corruption.
Scarborough ticked through the results and explained why he believes Democrats are pulling ahead. On healthcare, 57% of likely voters said they trusted Democrats to do a better job, compared with 37% who preferred Republicans.
“Republicans gave tax cuts to billionaires so they could cut healthcare in rural America,” he said, referring to President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
On cost of living, something Scarborough said Trump “will not talk about,” voters backed Democrats 55% to 40%. The “Morning Joe” co-host said Trump was also dragging down his party on international issues. Republicans trailed Democrats by 10 points on their handling of foreign wars.
Trump “can’t get out of the war he started in Iran, even though he was warned by everybody not to go into Iran,” Scarborough said.
The poll found that voters preferred Democrats to address potential threats from artificial intelligence, 48% to 37%. Scarborough blamed the gap on Trump’s refusal to take action, even as industry researchers warn of the dangers of leaving the technology unregulated.
“He just says he’s not going to do anything about the most challenging, most hopeful, but also the most dangerous technology of our lifetime,” he said.
The results mark a sharp shift from 2024, when Trump drew a broad coalition of voters who viewed him as the change candidate to deliver on the issues they cared about. Scarborough recalled that “bro culture was ushered in” and “we were told that we were in the dawning of sort of the age of Joe Rogan.”
“So you look at all of those numbers … my, how things have changed in two years,” he said.
The poll was conducted Oct. 12-19 among 3,494 voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points.
Rep. Ilhan Omar revealed new details about last week’s federal raid on her home in Washington, D.C., which she said was “designed” to intimidate her. The Minnesota Democrat sat down with MS NOW’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday for her first interview since federal agents searched her residence as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
Omar, who is the first Somali American member of Congress, said she had returned home from traveling and was only asleep for 2 1/2 hours before she was awakened by agents “pounding on the doors” on Oct. 12. The congresswoman told Hayes her first thought was that “something was on fire.”
“You don’t show up to somebody’s house that early in the morning unless you’re trying to freak them out. And you know it obviously did freak all of us out,” Omar said.
“It sounded like an urgent evacuation sort-of situation,” she added. “So it took us a while to figure out what was actually happening.”
When her husband opened the door, Omar said she was presented with a warrant. She also said she was asked to sign a document waiving protections provided to her in the Constitution as a member of Congress. Omar declined.
“That was obnoxious. I couldn’t understand why they would think that I would sign such a thing,” she said.
During the raid, which Omar said lasted four to five hours and involved as many as 25 agents, the authorities “mostly conducted themselves in a decent way” as they searched the home for items in compliance with the warrant, the congresswoman said.
‘A bizarre, bizarre thing’
Omar said the federal agents seized her phone, an old phone, her youngest daughter’s old phone, her husband’s notebooks and a camera he had received from his uncle. She also said they took a Somali phrase book for children, which her husband was using to learn the language.
The Democrat said she was “surprised” when she was handed a receipt for the items.
“To walk away with 17 items of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones was such a bizarre, bizarre thing,” she said.
Asked about the raid on Omar’s house, the Justice Department told MS NOW in a statement last week that Homeland Security Investigations “executed a judicially authorized search warrant” and said it was “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”
A source told MS NOW the warrant listed potential violations involving immigration fraud, false statements in immigration proceedings and conspiracy. According to CNN, which cites people familiar with the probe, investigators are looking into whether Omar or her late father made false statements about her age during the citizenship process.
Omar arrived in the United States in March 1995 at the age of 12 after fleeing the civil war in Somalia and spending four years in a refugee camp in Kenya. She later became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000 at 17.
“The people who knocked on my door, searching for papers, literally have his papers,” Omar told Hayes of her father on Wednesday. “They are the ones who processed us to come to the United States.”
While she said she takes the matter “seriously,” she doesn’t believe the federal government has a case to prosecute her.
“It would be a huge undertaking to, I suppose, indict a 12-year-old for being so cleverly conspiring to defraud immigration services to come to the United States,” she said. “I’m sure there are a lot of smart 12-year-olds, but that seems like a leap.”
Trump’s ‘obsession’
This isn’t the first time Omar’s immigration status has been scrutinized. The Washington Post reported that in 2019, during President Donald Trump’s first term, a political appointee asked immigration authorities to look into Omar’s records for any evidence of fraud. But Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to open a full investigation, according to the report.
Omar also told Hayes she did not know about the 2019 probe until she “saw it in The Washington Post reporting a couple of days ago.”
“I did hear that they opened, that there was an opening of my immigration file, but I didn’t know to the extent of what the opening of my investigation meant and who opened it,” she said.
The Wall Street Journal reported the Biden administration also looked into Omar but declined to move forward due to lack of evidence.
When asked if she believes Trump has nothing to do with the ongoing investigation into her, Omar told Hayes, “Absolutely not.”
“He’s got everything to do with it,” she said of Trump, pointing to reported efforts by his first administration to investigate her.
Trump and Omar have had a long-standing, contentious relationship. In 2019, the president attacked Omar and three other Democratic congresswomen in a series of tweets telling them to “go back” to the countries they came from. At a rally days later, Trump criticized Omar by name as the crowd chanted “Send her back.”
Over the years, Trump has frequently repeated unproven rumors about the congresswoman’s personal life, including her immigration status and an unproven conspiracy theory that she had married her brother to bypass U.S. laws.
In 2025, Omar told The Guardian she believes Trump has an “unhealthy and creepy obsession” with her.
Omar told Hayes she suspects the raid was partly the president making good on his promise after years of threatening the congresswoman.
“They’ve done this sort of full press where they kept alluding to the fact that something was going to happen to me,” she said. “And I think a lot of their right-wing influencers, who seem to have direct connection to not just the president but his orbit, I think they were starting to lose faith that these were empty promises and they had to do something. I believe to say, ‘Hey, look, we raided her house.’”
The 44-year-old and mother of three has spoken openly about the surge of death threats she has received since taking office. She told Hayes that she and her family will have to move from their home due to the highly publicized raid.
“Obviously, I can’t continue to live there,” she said. “So we have to figure out where to move to because our address has been public, and with the death threats that I deal with, it’s no longer going to be feasible to be in that house and have my kids visiting off and on, having people track them.”
Despite the challenges, the congresswoman said she would not let the president’s efforts break her.
“In my faith teachings, we believe that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” she said. “I think I’m designed uniquely by God to withstand all of this.”
Omar said she was “confident” in her truth that she did nothing wrong and told Hayes she believed the justice system would prevail.
“If I continue to stand up to bullies and people who are carrying out ungodly corruption, I’m going to be okay,” she said.
This story has been updated to include additional information.
As millions of Americans struggle with rising costs, MS NOW’s Luke Russert said President Donald Trump’s “inflation crisis” has come for his MAGA merch. On Tuesday’s “The Weeknight,” Russert and co-hosts Symone Sanders Townsend and Michael Steele reacted to a new report from The Washington Sun that found prices for several Trump-branded items have surged in recent years, far outpacing U.S. inflation.
In 2015, Make America Great Again hats, now a symbol of Trump’s political career, sold for $25 on the then-candidate’s website. In 2026, the same hats cost $55. The Washington Sun also reported that the website has raised the price of Trump’s Victory 45-47 perfume twice since its February 2024 debut at $99. It now costs $249. “That reeks of impropriety,” Russert said of the 151.52% increase.
“I guess they thought they were going to be exempt,” Sanders Townsend said, adding, “This is what happens” when people believe “the consequences from this administration” won’t affect them. “Now the little nasty perfume is twice than it was before.”
Steele said Trump had long “tapped” into a market in which he could put his name onalmost any product and expect it to sell. Trump thought, he said, “I’ll put my face on something, and that’s enough. They will buy it.”
“And they have,” Steele continued. “Y’all have made Donald Trump a very, very wealthy man.”
But as the prices climb, the MS NOW host said, even some of Trump’s most devoted supporters are feeling the squeeze.
“When you go to look at a rally, you can see people decked out to the nines in MAGA merch,” Steele said. “But that roost has come home for a lot of these people because now they can’t afford the stuff.”
When contacted by The Washington Sun, the White House directed questions to the Trump Organization, which the outlet said did not respond to requests for comment.
The White House has repeatedly denied the president has profited from his office.
You can watch the full discussion from “The Weeknight” here.
MS NOW’s Mika Brzezinski called out Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy for his “sick and depraved” ad targeting his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton. The “Morning Joe” co-host said the controversial video, featuring Acton’s estranged mother, “lumps Republicans in a whole pot of ugly,” and she questioned whether the ad could have “ripple effects” for the party far beyond Ohio.
In the 60-second ad, Donna Arthur, whose husband, Cledith Arthur, was indicted on charges of raping Acton when she was a child, called her daughter a “liar” and said she had “a serious problem.” Acton has not spoken to her mother in almost five decades, after she defended Acton’s stepfather. Cledith Arthur fled the state and was never tried or convicted. Donna and Cledith Arthur remained married until his death in 2004.
When it began to circulate online Monday, the ad’s origin was unclear, but the Ramaswamy campaign confirmed on Tuesday night that it was responsible. Axios reported that the Republican was investing $4 million to air it statewide.
“They’re doubling down on this sick, depraved effort to dirty up their opponent by using Amy Acton’s mother against her,” Brzezinski said on Wednesday morning.
She called the video “as sick as it gets” and “as low as I’ve ever seen it.” She added, “And that’s saying a lot in the age of Trump.”
“There seems to be no lie too ugly for them, no trauma they won’t weaponize, no line they won’t cross for power,” Brzezinski continued. “This is the same Ramaswamy campaign that blamed Acton for a nursing home death that the records contradict. This is also the same party that swore immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets.”
“Elections do have consequences, decency being one of them, and Ohio voters have a choice to make on this,” she said.
The MS NOW host predicted that the ad would backfire on the Ramaswamy campaign but wondered “if this will go beyond the Ohio governor’s race.” Brzezinski argued that it might remind voters of the Republican Party’s repeated efforts to block the release of the Epstein files.
“This lumps Republicans in a whole pot of ugly, whether it be from Epstein on down to taking an abused child’s mother and using that mother against the adult child in her campaign,” she said.
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Maddow said Trump has spent his second term “pursuing things that make him feel good about himself” instead of focusing on policies that could give Republicans issues to tout to voters.
“You get all the vanity projects and him naming everything, and all the gold gewgaws everywhere that make him feel wealthy, all the pointless and feckless revenge investigations and attempted prosecutions of his perceived enemies,” she said. “It’s all stuff that’s designed to make him feel powerful and to feel good about himself.”
The “Rachel Maddow Show” host said Trump’s approval rating is “deep, deep, deep down in the political toilet” and argued that his preoccupation with praise has left little room for a strategy focused on actually helping Republicans in November.
“I think it’s obvious that he’s not going to pursue a midterm strategy that is based on propping up vulnerable Republican candidates other than himself,” she said.
Maddow said Trump had become such a “wuss” and a “snowflake” that he could only “bear hearing happy stories about himself.” She added, “He can only go to places where he gets adulation, and he only can stand ever hearing ‘Yes.’”
“He’s only going to go to places that still like him, and there are vanishingly few of those left,” she said.
MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough blasted President Donald Trump for making false and misleading claims about Kansas Democratic Senate nominee Adam Hamilton at a rally for Republican Sen. Roger Marshall on Monday, asking how “stupid” the president thinks his supporters are.
Trump attacked Hamilton, the senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, the nation’s largest United Methodist congregation. He said Hamilton supports “flooding Kansas with unvetted refugees,” said the pastor “openly mocks Jesus” and accused him of using church money to fund “anti-religious transgender activities.”
“Everything you said there was a lie,” Scarborough said Tuesday on “Morning Joe,” after playing a clip of Trump’s remarks. A fact check by The Kansas City Star found that Hamilton does not support open borders and has said “dangerous criminals don’t belong here.” Hamilton also told ABC News earlier this month that he believes there are two genders while criticizing Trump for turning transgender people into a political target: “The president has taken a group of people that represent a very tiny minority of people who are bullied and picked on and harassed, and he’s tried to make them a campaign issue.”
Scarborough called it “deeply offensive” for Trump to attack “the pastor of the largest Methodist church in America, who preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“If you listen to his sermons, that’s what he does, which is the antithesis of what Donald Trump does every day when he lies about people, when he’s angry, when he attacks other people — not for political differences, but just attacks them personally and spreads lies,” he added.
Trump also defended Marshall over a controversy involving his former OB-GYN practice. A review of Kansas court records by The New York Times found that the practice sued more than 700 former patients over unpaid bills, some as small as $101, and routinely were charged 18% annual interest. In 81 cases, patients were arrested after missing court dates.
The president said Marshall “was given a bum rap because he was mandated by law to request, strongly, money owed from patients.” But no law required doctors to sue patients over unpaid bills.
“Marshall wasn’t mandated to go after single mothers and have them thrown in jail,” Scarborough said, adding, “It’s just like, how stupid do you think your supporters are?”
Watch Scarborough’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta castigated the Trump administration for threatening local election officials, telling MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff that the federal government is “trying to bully and frighten and intimidate” public servants ahead of the midterm elections.
Late last week, the Justice Department warned Los Angeles County officials that they could face prosecution if they process or tabulate a ballot from someone the federal government suspects is a noncitizen, according to a letter obtained by MS NOW.
The warning came after the administration sued California, seeking to block the state from counting mail ballots from people it has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their citizenship can be verified. The lawsuit alleges that more than 20,000 people who may be noncitizens are registered to vote in California.
Bonta said the officials targeted by the administration are public servants working to count votes accurately and protect Californians’ right to vote.
“Here you have the federal government, with bluster and intimidation and bullying, trying to scare them into disenfranchising voters, and it’s wrong,” he said Sunday.
The attorney general called the administration’s claims about widespread voter fraud baseless, saying audits, recounts and court cases have found no evidence of it. While ineligible voting should be prosecuted, he said, the administration is using isolated cases to attack states and disenfranchise voters.
“There are one-offs, at times, when some human beings try to or have violated the election laws, like a Republican in Orange County who tried to register her dog,” he said. “And should that person get prosecuted? Yes, they should, and we do not think any ineligible voter should vote. But what is happening here is the Trump administration is attacking states, usually blue states or swing states, that they want to pick a fight with.”
Bonta said the attacks on California are part of a wider effort by the administration to sow doubt about the country’s elections before the midterms.
“They’re desperate. It’s embarrassing for them. They’re in the death throes of this election cycle, staring down a blue wave where they’re going to get thrashed, and they are planning for what they do after they get thrashed,” he told MS NOW. “This is their contingency plan.”
Bonta said California would stand firm in its “commitment to accurate, fair, reliable, secure elections” and keep fighting the administration.
“We will meet the federal government in court,” he said.
You can watch Bonta’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
“The Trump administration is making the courts look like fools,” he said.
With the midterm elections quickly approaching, Weissmann warned it is time for America’s judges to work “faster and smarter” before it’s too late.
“The administration, over and over again, is doing things unilaterally without permission and, at times, in violation of court orders,” the former Justice Department official explained.
According to an analysis from The Associated Press earlier this year, district court judges have found the second Trump administration violated or failed to follow federal court orders in at least 31 lawsuits and in more than 250 individual immigration cases.
When the court does intervene, sometimes it’s already too late, Weissmann said, pointing to the administration’s use of taxpayer dollars to run ads for the president. When a federal judge blocked that effort, it was only after nearly $22 million had already been spent.
“Tens of millions of people saw those ads, paid for by you and me,” he said.
Weissmann argued that Trump’s DOJ has effectively taken a “do now and ask questions later” approach to the law.
“The court only belatedly says, ‘Hey, don’t do that.’ But the damage is already done, and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he said.
The former federal prosecutor said it was time for courts to be “faster and smarter” in responding to Trump’s blatantly illegal moves, and he cautioned against setting “a permission structure for this administration,” especially as the election approaches.
“What I am worried about is: The midterms are coming up, and is this going to be a government that goes ahead and seizes ballots with the idea that we can break the chain of custody, we can make it impossible to count votes? And maybe later a court will say, ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ but the damage will have been done,” he explained.
“There has to be a deterrent,” Weissmann warned. “And courts have to be faster and smarter to not get outplayed.”
MS NOW’s Michael Steele said the American people “turned the hand” of Donald Trump after the president announced the government would not livestream the execution of the Fort Hood shooter. “I think we need to sometimes put a check on ourselves, and in this instance, we did,” he said.
Last week, Pentagon officials said the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people at a military medical building in 2009, would be livestreamed. But on Thursday, Trump reversed course in a Truth Social post, writing, “He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”
Although the livestream has been called off, Steele said the fact that officials considered broadcasting the execution raises profound questions about the country’s leadership. “What does it say that our country would even consider doing something like this?” he asked.
“This level of barbarism, it doesn’t matter where you are on the death penalty and all of that; this is about who we are as a nation and whether or not we want to participate in this type of voyeurism, this type of dehumanizing behavior,” he continued.
As “The Weeknight” co-host pointed out, even some victims’ families expressed reservations about the plan. “It is painful for the families,” he said. “It is enough to have to live through the loss of their loved ones, but then to have this type of reality TV approach to something so serious, a matter so serious.”
Steele said the controversy underscored why those in power must be held accountable by the public. In this case, he said, Americans had to question whether the government’s plan reflected the country’s values. “I think we need to sometimes put a check on ourselves, and in this instance, we did,” he said, crediting public backlash for Trump’s reversal.
“I think the response of the American people is what turned the hand of the president on this,” he continued, adding that he was “grateful” the public chose to stand up for decency and sent Trump a clear message: “No, we’re not going to watch that.”
“We decided. You responded. That’s how this works,” Steele said.
MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough criticized President Donald Trump for condemning Ukraine’s renewed strikes on Russian oil sites while saying little about Moscow’s continued violations of his energy ceasefire.
“These events are shocking — even by Trumpian standards,” Scarborough said.
In an interview with Newsmax on Thursday, Trump called Ukraine’s decision to resume drone strikes on Russian oil refineries “a disgrace” and said the attacks would drive up global oil prices. (Trump has repeatedly blamed the Russia-Ukraine war for surging energy costs, though experts say the U.S. war with Iran has had a greater impact.)
Reacting to Trump’s comments, Scarborough said Friday on “Morning Joe” that he “just can’t get Ukraine off my mind and the absolute betrayal of Ukraine.”
The MS NOW host cast Trump’s criticism of Ukraine as the latest in a series of moves that he argued favor Moscow. Last week, Trump announced the United States would lift sanctions on Russian diesel exports. Scarborough said the agreement would help “pump billions of dollars into Vladimir Putin’s killing machines.”
He also cited Reuters’ report that an order to limit Ukraine’s access to SpaceX’s Starshield satellite service came from inside the White House. The temporary restriction disrupted Ukrainian drone operations, according to the report. A White House official denied that Trump ordered the Pentagon to limit the service.
“That’s all in Donald Trump’s hands,” Scarborough continued. “He’s the one in charge of this.” He said he believed Trump was “doing everything he can to help” Putin “win this war.”
According to the “Morning Joe” co-host, Trump has “been telling us who he is since 2015” when it comes to his feelings toward Putin.
“He’s always been with Russia,” he said. “Long before this war in 2015, while he was running for president, he was talking about his great admiration for Vladimir Putin.”
Scarborough also recalled what he called Trump’s “shameful, pathetic, weak performance” at his 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, during which Trump publicly cast doubt on U.S. intelligence agency findings on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Since Trump returned to the White House, Scarborough said, “we’ve heard more of the same.” He said Trump’s advisers would share responsibility for the consequences of the administration’s approach to Ukraine.
“Everybody around him that has anything to do with this policy, this betrayal of the West, this betrayal of Western freedom, this betrayal of Ukraine, this will be marked upon their legacies for as long as they live,” he said.
You can watch Scarborough’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
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