It’s nice to see The New York Times do some actual journalism:
Running under the banner of Donald J. Trump’s populist political movement, Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown, humbly calls himself a “car guy from Cleveland” and recounts the modest circumstances of his childhood, when his immigrant family started over from scratch in the United States.
“We came here with absolutely nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Moreno said in 2023, in what became his signature pitch. His father “had to leave everything behind,” he has said, remembering what he called his family’s “lower-middle-class status.”
But there is much more that Mr. Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.
Mr. Moreno was born into a rich and politically connected family in Bogotá, a city that it never completely left behind, where some members continue to enjoy great wealth and status.
While his parents left Colombia in 1971 to start over in the United States, where Mr. Moreno fully transplanted, some of his siblings eventually returned. One of his brothers served as Bogotá’s ambassador to the United States. Another founded a development and construction empire that stretches across the Andes from the Colombian interior to its Caribbean shores.
Friendly reminder, The Guardian had a piece out last month that also called out Moreno for lying about his background:
In 2021, as Moreno moved into national politics with a first run for a Senate nomination, the Cleveland Plain Dealer said he “says he came to the United States as a child with his mother and siblings to flee socialism in their native Colombia. He believes that same ideology is rising in the United States, and he wants to fight back.”
But when Moreno was born, on 14 February 1967, Colombia was nine years into the 16-year period of National Front government, in which conservative and liberal parties alternated being in power as a way to avoid violence between the two factions.
Furthermore, the first leftwing Colombian government in modern times is the current one, headed by Gustavo Petro and in power since 2022.
Colombia has long been home to leftwing guerrilla groups. As described by the US Congressional Research Service, when Moreno lived there, the country was home to “leftist, Marxist-inspired insurgencies … including the Farc, launched in 1964, and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), which formed the following year”.
Such groups, the CRS says, “conducted kidnappings, committed serious human rights violations, and carried out a campaign of terror that aimed to unseat the central government in Bogotá”.
Moreno, however, has described an early childhood far removed from such worries.
By his own description, his father was secretary of health under Misael Pastrana, a conservative and the last National Front president between 1970 and 1974.
Here’s something else you should know about Moreno:
Moreno, a former car dealership owner, had a net worth as high as $168 million last year, more than enough to power his bid to unseat Brown. That’s what made the language in an invitation to a recent high-dollar fundraiser in Cleveland all the more notable.
The invitation, obtained by the AP, stated that the first $3,300 of each contribution would be used for “debt retirement, until such debt is extinguished,” and before raising money for his general election contest.
It’s common for candidates who emerge from competitive primaries, as Moreno did March 19, to ask donors to help pay off debt. What’s unusual in Moreno’s case is that he is the only person identified on his most recent campaign finance disclosure who would benefit from retiring the campaign’s debt. The records show he lent his campaign $4.5 million in personal and bank loans, which means that the bank would also benefit by receiving interest payments. But no other debts are listed on the document.
In a statement, Moreno’s campaign said “not one dime” of the money raised at the event would be used to help him recoup his loans. Instead, they said, it would be used to pay off separate debts that the campaign racked up during the primary, but they declined to offer additional details on what was owed.
Ozzie Palomo, a Connecticut-based Republican fundraiser who was part of former 2024 GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s finance committee, called the priority of retiring debt “a bit of an unorthodox approach” that could be a turn-off for donors.
“You invest in a campaign in hopes of them winning,” Palomo said. “Not in hopes of paying off someone else’s debt.”
Also, he’s not a populist, he’s an elitist:
To say the Aston Martin Vulcan is a luxury vehicle would be like saying Jeff Bezos is well-off. In other words, a vast understatement. The two-door, two-seater with a cherry-red carbon-fiber body can reach a max speed of 208 miles per hour and go from 0-60 miles per hour in 2.9 seconds. Vulcans are a symbol of opulence more rarified than the imperial Fabergé eggs created for the Romanov family dynasty: 43 of those eggs are known to still exist in the world, but only 24 Aston Martin Vulcans do. And beginning in 2015, Bernie Moreno—now a Republican candidate for US Senate in Ohio—was the proud owner of one of them for a period of time.
“I’ve loved cars since I was a little kid and this car, to me, is just an absolute work of art,” Moreno, who in November will face incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown in one of the most competitive Senate races this cycle, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “When I saw it, I knew I had to have it.”
He didn’t just want to have the Vulcan, which he purchased for $2.3 million. He also wanted to drive it. With at least three police cars providing an escort down busy streets that were partially closed for the occasion, Moreno cruised down Lorain and Stearns roads in the Cleveland suburb of North Olmsted, at times reaching 60 miles per hour, the Plain Dealer reported. Public records requests processed by the city of North Olmsted and obtained by Mother Jones did not return records indicating Moreno paid the city for its services.
Driving the Vulcan on the street may have violated federal regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has strict emissions requirements on which cars may be imported and driven in the United States. The Vulcan does not meet requirements for an everyday commuting car, but between March 2015 and February 2017, Aston Martin applied for and received nine EPA “competition” exceptions for 2015 Vulcans, according to the agency.
An EPA spokesperson says the nine exceptions were for cars that must be “solely” used for competition.
This is what a real populist looks like:
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