Fox News senior political analyst Juan Williams warned fellow Republicans on Monday that President Donald Trump has accelerated the GOP's "downward political spiral," arguing that "scummy" campaign behavior from Trump and his allies has dragged conservative politics into the gutter.

Writing in a column for The Hill, the Washington-based political news outlet, Williams catalogued what he described as "scummy political advertising" and "despicable lies" being purveyed by the MAGA movement across several 2026 midterm contests — races that, alongside every House seat and a third of the Senate, will determine control of Congress in November 2026.

The first example, he wrote, involved false claims circulated against James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas. "First, right-wing smear merchants, aided by Elon Musk's X platform, trashed Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (D) with wretchedly false claims," Williams wrote. smears alleged that Talarico had left the campaign trail for treatment at "an Ohio hospital for the insane." In reality, Williams noted, Talarico had paused campaigning while recovering from the flu. He called the story "a despicable lie" intended to divert attention from the multiple scandals surrounding Talarico's opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).

Republicans, Williams argued, should be scrutinizing Paxton's record instead: the attorney general was impeached by the Republican-run Texas House, was divorced by his wife on "Biblical grounds," has offered "no credible explanation" for rampant corruption scandals, and was reported to the FBI by his own staff. Even members of the Bush family — "an outright Republican dynasty," in Williams' words — have publicly announced their support for Talarico over Paxton.

"Second in the race to the bottom," according to Williams, are what he called Muslim-hating attacks on Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. "Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), his Republican opponent, portrays El-Sayed as a terrorist sympathizer and supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood," Williams wrote, describing it as "an ugly appeal to Islamophobia" built on "the bigoted idea that American Muslims have terrorist sympathies." Rogers' campaign has released AI-generated ads depicting a fabricated El-Sayed laughing at calls for "Death to America." Such "odious lies about Muslims, so poisonously divisive, still resonate 25 years after the Sept. 11 attacks," Williams wrote. The use of AI-generated video to invent a rival's reaction also shows how synthetic imagery has entered the campaign advertising toolkit in this cycle.

But "the winner for the lowest act in this lineup of slander," Williams wrote, "goes to Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R)." His campaign ran an advertisement in which the elderly mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, accuses the Democrat of lying about her childhood traumas. The ad makes no mention of the fact that Acton's stepfather was charged with abusing a 12-year-old girl — and that Acton has identified herself as that child. According to Williams, Acton's mother sided with the man charged with abusing her daughter; Ramaswamy ignored public records showing the stepfather had been indicted. The mother lost custody of Acton and her brother while remaining married to the accused abuser, who left the state and failed to appear in court.

Acton's brother called the ad a "despicable low," blasting Ramaswamy's willingness to score political points from childhood abuse. Even some Republicans described it as "shameful, disgusting, offensive."

Rather than retract the spot, the Ramaswamy campaign doubled down by putting more money behind it, while Trump advised the candidate to "keep it up" and Vice President JD Vance dismissed the ensuing anger as "whining."

Child abuse, Williams observed, "has been a dark recurring issue in these midterms." He noted that the Ramaswamy episode comes as Republicans in Ohio spend millions to reelect Rep. Max Miller (R), whose former wife has accused him of abusing her and their young daughter. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), the child's grandfather, has called Miller unfit to serve and demanded his resignation — yet the Republican-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund has booked more than $5 million in television advertising in the race, a spending commitment that keeps institutional GOP money in the contest even as one of the party's own senators presses for the incumbent to resign.

Williams tied the pattern to a 1993 essay by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who famously coined the phrase "defining deviancy downward" to describe a public debate that recast once-unacceptable conduct as tolerable. Trump, he wrote, "with his infamous claim to grab women by the genitals and involvement with a porn actress has accelerated that downward spiral, lowering the bar for wretched political discourse to new nadirs." The 2026 Republican midterm campaigns have "sunk" even lower, Williams concluded, warning: "This is the age of get-in-the-gutter politics."

The contests at the center of his case — the Texas and Michigan Senate races and the Ohio governor's race — go to voters in November 2026, leaving months of campaigning, and the advertising disputes Williams describes, still to play out.