President Donald Trump used his final Ohio rally before the midterms to put a prize on the table for one Senate race. Standing in the Shoemaker Center in Chillicothe on Wednesday night, he told the crowd: "I want you to know that if Jon Husted wins, I am going to consider putting the Space Academy right here in Ohio. Everybody wants it." Six days before Election Day, the president tied the future home of a new federal academy to the result of a single contest.
It was Trump's third Ohio stop this month and his last in the state before voters decide on Tuesday. He was campaigning for Husted, who is fighting former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in the special election for the Senate seat once held by Vice President JD Vance; for Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor; and for Issue 3, putting the state photo voter ID requirement into the constitution. The Senate race is tied in one poll and has Brown up by three points in two others. Two hecklers were removed minutes into the speech; the offer and a defence were what he came to deliver.
The Space Academy he spoke of is the proposed United States Space Academy, a NASA-led federal academy that would train the next generation for America's space enterprise — astronauts, scientists, engineers, operators, entrepreneurs and Space Force personnel. Trump signed the executive order setting it up on August 28 at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, creating a presidential commission to recommend how it should be built and governed, who could attend and what service its graduates would owe. The commission's report is due to the president by December 26. The vision is a taxpayer-funded, full-scholarship school whose graduates would serve in return — some going into the Space Force, which has never had an academy of its own, and most into civilian federal space work. Where the academy will sit has not been decided; that is the decision Trump was dangling over the Ohio crowd.
Ohio is already in the competition. On September 21, Senators Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted, Congressman Mike Turner and Governor Mike DeWine — who formed a state steering group to run it — launched Ohio's bid to land the academy at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Wright State University in Dayton. Each state could file one proposal, due October 26, and Ohio's case rests on its history and its hardware: the birthplace of aviation and the Wright brothers, Neil Armstrong, the research commands at Wright-Patt and NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Husted, who helped launch the bid, calls Ohio the best possible place "to train future generations of aerospace leaders." At an earlier Ohio rally, in Vandalia on October 3, Trump had made the state's chances depend on Republicans winning the midterms. At Chillicothe he narrowed it: the academy is now tied to Husted's name on the ballot.
The president's other big moment of the night was a defence of Ramaswamy, whose campaign has been under fire for an advertisement built around his opponent's mother. "Vivek was treated very unfairly," Trump said. "He had the mother of his opponent say that her daughter was a liar… And the press, the fake news, criticized him. … How the hell is that his problem?" The ad is the Ramaswamy campaign's own. It features Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of the Democratic nominee, Amy Acton, speaking to camera: "It's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past.… She's lied her entire life. My daughter needs help." And: "Don't let her become your governor. If you think she'll make your life better, you're fooling yourself." The video first circulated with no name attached on October 19 and 20; the campaign confirmed the next day it was theirs, said it would spend $4 million putting it on television and online, and says Arthur was not paid.
The history behind the ad is a matter of court record, and it is why the criticism has been so fierce. Acton was removed from her mother's custody at the age of 12 after her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with child rape in 1978; the case file also references an earlier incest charge against him. He was never tried — he and Donna Arthur fled the state, and he stayed married to Acton's mother until his death in 2004. Acton's brother, Philip Stearns, has corroborated her account. Fact-checkers note the ad never mentions the estrangement or the charge, and the court documents point the other way from the mother's claim. Critics, including sexual-violence advocates, say the ad accuses a candidate of inventing her childhood abuse and will be heard by every survivor watching; one Trump adviser reportedly warned the campaign beforehand: "It's siding with the rapist protector mom. This was never a good idea."
Ramaswamy has answered for the ad himself. The ad, he says, "had nothing to do with childhood abuse," and at a stop in Delaware, Ohio, last Friday he said: "Voters deserve to know what the truth is, and the truth that this woman is a liar. So we ran an ad that said she is a liar in this campaign and over the course of her record." Acton has answered too, in full: "I won't normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is just something I'm complaining about, who today just released an ad using my birth mother, who I was removed from at the age of 12 for severe abuse and neglect, and sexual abuse." The fight has split Republicans. Governor DeWine called the ad "deeply troubling" and asked Ramaswamy to take it down; Trump called DeWine "disloyal to the Republican Party," wrote that he had told Ramaswamy to "keep it up," and Vice President JD Vance said he was "a little bit disgusted" at Republicans "whining more about that advertisement" than about what Democrats want to do to the country.
For Ohio's citizens, the two halves of this rally land on the same Tuesday. The Senate race could settle which party controls the chamber, and attached to it now is a federal academy — construction, jobs, and a tuition-covered path into space careers for Ohio students willing to serve. The governor's race has become an argument about whose word can be trusted — a mother against a daughter, a campaign against the court record — and the president has placed himself squarely on one side of it. Both verdicts are Ohio's to give on November 3.
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