The Latest: Trump backs Vivek Ramaswamy on ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother
Oct 23, 2026, 6:34 AM | Updated: 9:16 am
President Donald Trump listens a gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at a campaign rally at the Covelli Centre, in Youngstown, Ohio, Monday, Oct. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
Credit: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
The backlash over an Ohio campaign advertisement attacking Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor, spread beyond the state’s borders Thursday, when President Donald Trump posted on social media that Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad was “hitting pay dirt” and that Acton was “fair game.”
Trump’s aggressive defense of Ramaswamy practically guarantees that more of his party’s candidates will face questions about the issue at a moment when they already risk being dragged down by the president’s low popularity.
Here’s the latest:
Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins is out with a new debate comment telling her to “shut up.”
“Troy has something to say to Maine women. Shut up,” the ad’s narrator says.
The ad references a comment Jackson made during a debate Oct. 15, when Collins said a person disrupting the event was “obviously one of Troy’s supporters.”
Jackson responded: “Oh, shut up. I don’t even know that kid.”
He added later that he didn’t regret the statement and that he had no idea who the person interrupting the debate was.
A message seeking a response to the ad was left Friday with Jackson’s campaign.
Collins, the only Republican running this year in a state Kamala Harris carried in 2024, is seeking a 6th term. Jackson, a Democrat, is a former state Senate president and lumberjack.
The U.S. Treasury Department proposed a rule Thursday to crack down on American high-tech investments such as supercomputing and artificial intelligence in China, Russia, North Korea and other “countries of concern.”
The U.S. government has been working for years to deny China and other adversaries investments that could help them boost their military power.
That program began in 2023 when then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order putting restrictions on outbound U.S. investments in sectors such as semiconductors, quantum computing and artificial intelligence going into China. Treasury later established the Outbound Investment Security Program.
In December 2025, Congress passed a law that codified and expanded the program to target more technologies and more foreign countries, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Russia.
The inclusion of Russia in the proposed rule has come days after Trump waived sanctions on Russia following a diesel deal with President Vladimir Putin.
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The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for New Hampshire to fully ban the use of student IDs for voting during the midterm elections.
The justices granted a Republican-backed emergency appeal and blocked the use of student IDs as a backup method of identification. The Supreme Court cited a longstanding legal principle that judges shouldn’t change voting rules too close to Election Day.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only justice to publicly dissent.
New Hampshire passed a law this year that said student IDs would no longer be an expressly accepted form of identification for obtaining a ballot. The secretary of state then issued guidance barring them as a backup way to prove a voter’s identity.
A judge left the law in place but blocked the guidance in early October, prompting the appeal to the Supreme Court. The Republican National Committee weighed in to support the state.
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A federal judge on Thursday ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC by Dec. 11.
The order from U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett came as lawyers for the British broadcaster complained that Trump had delayed his appearance in his own lawsuit. Charles Tobin, attorney for the BBC, said that with two months left in the discovery period, “we still haven’t been able to depose the plaintiff.”
Meanwhile, it remained uncertain whether former special counsel Jack Smith would be allowed to sit for a deposition. Federal rules require current and former employees to receive permission from agency heads before testifying in court cases. Smith has requested permission but has not received an answer, and the judge ruled that the department must respond to him by Nov. 2.
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Trump told reporters that he had “heard something about” the Department of Justice investigating allegations that Corey Lewandowski profited off his past role as an adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, after media reports of an investigation surfaced Thursday.
Lewandowski, who worked at the agency as a special government employee during Kristi Noem’s tenure as Homeland Security secretary, was a longtime ally of Trump. The details of the allegations against Lewandowski aren’t yet clear, though the president said Thursday after a report in The Wall Street Journal that he had heard of the probe.
The president notably didn’t defend Lewandowski, who was his first campaign manager in 2016.
“I don’t know exactly what it is,” Trump told reporters. “All I know is, I want my people to be honest. And if they’re not going to be honest, they have to be prosecuted.” He added, “I’ll have my DOJ go and do whatever they have to do.”
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The backlash over an Ohio campaign advertisement attacking Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor, spread beyond the state’s borders Thursday, causing fresh headaches for Republicans with less than two weeks until the midterm elections.
The latest episode began when Gov. Mike DeWine criticized Vivek Ramaswamy, a fellow Republican that he endorsed as his successor, for running an ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother criticizing her. Acton’s mother lost custody of her children decades ago after her husband was indicted for raping Acton as a child.
But Trump took the opposite approach hours later, posting on social media that Ramaswamy’s ad was “hitting pay dirt” and questioning DeWine’s loyalty to the party.
Trump’s stance only hardened throughout the day. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said, “Amy Acton’s mother said horrible things about Amy Acton” and “she’s fair game.”
Trump’s aggressive defense of Ramaswamy practically guarantees that more of his party’s candidates will face questions about the issue at a moment when they already risk being dragged down by the president’s low popularity.
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