CNN anchor Jake Tapper gave Donald Trump a ruthless, on-air fact-check Wednesday after the president appeared to feign ignorance about a controversial campaign ad produced by Vivek Ramaswamy.

Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate has been under fire in recent days not only for creating the ad but also for continuing to spend money to promote it.

The ad features the estranged mother of Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent. In it, Acton’s birth mother calls her daughter “a liar.” However, she lost custody of her children when her husband – their stepfather – was indicted for allegedly raping Acton.

When asked about the ad outside the White House, Trump seemed to understand the controversy, but claimed it didn’t “have anything to do with Vivek.”

“The fact is, I know nothing about it, but I hear the mother went very rogue on the daughter — doesn’t have a lot of respect for the daughter — and I think the mother is a witness to things also, so who knows? And you have to figure that out. It’s a very unusual situation to have a mother hate a daughter that much,” Trump said.

Vice President JD Vance also refused to condemn the ad when he was asked about it.

After showing the clip on CNN, Tapper responded to Trump’s statement with a deadpan look.

“It’s Vivek’s ad,” Tapper said. “And he seems to know quite a bit about the ad. So the president and the vice president are standing by this woman who stood by an alleged accused child rapist and calling the child who was raped, now a woman, Amy Acton, calling her a liar to win an election.”

On Tuesday, Acton fiercely condemned the ad.

“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,” Acton told Spectrum News, a local outlet in Ohio.

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