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.
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