Any story about a family dispute is bound to be complex, but the politics surrounding Vivek Ramaswamy’s abhorrent attack ad are relatively straightforward. Amy Acton, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Ohio, was allegedly raped by her stepfather when she was a child.

Her Republican opponent, Ramaswamy, is trying to weaponize this in despicable fashion, pushing a campaign commercial that features Acton’s estranged mother, who sided with the stepfather even after his arrest and stayed with him until his death.

But in recent days, it’s become clear that this ad has taken on far greater significance than one commercial in one gubernatorial election. As The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg summarized in her latest column: It’s quite a feat, in this numb and debased era, to create a political so shocking and indecent that people from across the political spectrum feel the need to denounce it. The Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has long fashioned himself as a kind of Donald Trump 2.0 — younger and brainier but just as brash — has managed it.

By releasing what may be the most disgusting ad in American political history, he’s done more than just reveal his own low character. He’s opened a kind of proxy debate on the right about whether a post-Trump conservatism should try to reclaim some base-line morality or continue along its current smashmouth course.

Donald Trump has changed his party and his nation’s politics in a great many ways, but among the most important shifts is the degree to which the president has championed the politics of cruelty and dishonor. There are messages — from attack ads to speeches to social message postings — that Republican officials used to avoid, even when they agreed with the underlying point, in part to avoid a backlash and in part to maintain their public reputations and credibility.

In recent years, however, those scruples have been cast aside. GOP officials and candidates no longer hedge on depraved messaging: After having seen Americans twice elevate a malicious television personality to the nation’s highest office, they now routinely echo his amorality and cynicism, seeing it as a way to satisfy the party’s far-right base, to advance their own ambitions, or both.

Most decent people can and will agree that Ramaswamy’s attack ad is indefensible, but that ad has also taken on totemic value. “What the ad represents … is an opening salvo in the post-midterms fight for the Republican Party’s future,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin explained. “It’s a battle that will accelerate next year but may not culminate until the 2030s. Put simply, what sort of party does the GOP want to be — and what will the market bear?”

Trailing in polls and short on options, Ramaswamy made his choice, and the stain on his character is likely to be permanent. What the Ohioan might not have anticipated, however, is just how much his disgusting tactic has divided his own party.

Several prominent Republicans in the state, including outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine, have publicly condemned the ad, and others outside of Ohio have taken similar steps. Former GOP presidential contender Nikki Haley, for example, said via social media that Ramaswamy is “a bad guy.”A day later, Rep. Ashley Hinson, the party’s Senate hopeful in Iowa, called the commercial “absolutely terrible.”On the other side, there’s the White House, where the politics of cruelty and dishonor still thrive, and where there are Republican leaders who still believe repugnant messaging will dominate for the foreseeable future.

JD Vance, for example, declared this week that he’s “a little bit disgusted,” not by Ramaswamy’s gutter politics, but by members of his own party who are “whining” about civility.

The vice president’s reaction itself drew swift rebukes — The Bulwark published a piece that described Vance as a “sociopath” — but that didn’t stop Trump from picking up where his vice president left off.

On Wednesday, the president told reporters he didn’t “know anything about it,” before shifting gears and talking about how important he considers it to see a mother “hate her daughter that much.”A day later, Trump went much further and spent much of Thursday defending the ad, urging Ramaswamy to keep running it, demanding the public take the underlying claims “seriously,” and at Iowa rally, predicting that the ad would work in the GOP candidate’s favor.

In other words, Trump took care to keep dividing Republicans — with less than two weeks remaining, during the early voting period — in one of the nation’s most important gubernatorial races, by leaning into support for one of the most repulsive campaign ads in recent memory. Election Day is 11 days away. Watch this space.