VANDALIA, Ohio — Former President Donald Trump heaped insults onto an already bitter Republican primary for Ohio’s Senate seat as he stumped for entrepreneur Bernie Moreno, his endorsed candidate in the race, on Saturday.
In a 90-minute speech outside of Dayton, the former president labeled Matt Dolan, a wealthy state senator who has traded the lead with Moreno, as a RINO, or Republican in name only, and said his family’s decision to rename the Cleveland Guardians was disqualifying.
“He’s trying to become the next Mitt Romney, I think Mitt Romney is his hero,” Trump told the crowd.
“He’s easily pushed around by the woke-left lunatics who renamed his family’s baseball team,” he added, eventually polling the audience on which name the Guardians should go by. “My attitude is anybody that changes the name of the Cleveland Indians to the Cleveland Guardians should not be a senator, should not be in government.”
Trump touched down in Ohio three days before Republican voters choose who will challenge Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) for his seat in the fall. The race is among the most consequential to determining which party will control the upper chamber next year.
Moreno, despite receiving the endorsement of the former president, has been unable to break away from Dolan, a centrist who has earned the backing of establishment figures such as Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH). There is a third candidate in the race, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, but he has slipped to third in recent polling.
Moreno is focusing exclusively on Dolan in the campaign homestretch. Similar to Trump, he calls Dolan a “wannabe” Liz Cheney, another Republican who broke with the former president over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The Dolan campaign avoided mentioning the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in responding to the Saturday speech but repeated its portrayal of Moreno as a phony who reinvented himself to earn Trump’s support.
The Senate primary had always promised to be divisive. More than $35 million has already been reserved or spent on advertising, according to Medium Buying.
But the mud-slinging reached fever pitch on Thursday, when the Associated Press reported that Moreno’s work email had been used to create a profile soliciting sex with young men on an adult website.
Moreno has denounced the story as a “sick, last-minute attack by desperate people,” and an intern he employed in 2008, when the profile was created, accepted fault, calling it “part of a juvenile prank.”
Andrew Cornu, the founder of Adult Friend Finder, judged in a social media post on Saturday that the profile was “consistent with a prank or someone just checking out the site.” The Washington Examiner has not independently verified the Associated Press’s reporting.
Dolan himself has shied away from the story in the two days since it broke. But his allies have seized on it, prompting bitter denunciations from Moreno and his wife, Bridget.
Within hours, Buckeye Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Dolan, cut statewide TV and radio ads that paint Moreno as “creepy” and “damaged goods.”
In response, the Moreno campaign has sent cease-and-desist letters that prompted at least 12 stations to pull the commercials, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Trump, who deviated from the script as the wind made seeing his teleprompter difficult, alluded to the controversy in his speech.
“You know, I didn’t think I’d say this because, you know, they’re doing a number on him just like they’ve done on everybody else,” he told the crowd.
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He compared Moreno’s treatment to his own, referring to the Russia investigation and two impeachments against him. But Trump spent most of his comments on the race selling Moreno as a conservative who would advance his agenda in the Senate.
In addition to Trump, Moreno was joined at the rally by Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
