From suburban Ohio to right-wing warrior
Senate candidate who once dodged Trump now a vocal supporter
IBEACHWOOD, Ohio n the fall of 2016, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was pressing Ohio’s young state treasurer, Josh Mandel, to step it up. A former Marine, he held some sway with Republican voters, and Trump aides wanted him doing more public events.
But Mandel couldn’t quite find the time. He just had so many scheduling conflicts, he joked over breakfast with Matt Cox, a Republican lobbyist and, at the time, a friend. Cox recalled Mandel rattling off the excuses he used to avoid being too closely linked to a candidate he wasn’t sold on: Running after his three children, other political commitments, his observance of all those Jewish holidays.
Once Trump won, any reluctance from Mandel fell away fast. Within weeks, he spoke at the president-elect’s first victory rally, slamming those who were “avoiding Trump” during the election. Five days after the rally, he launched his second bid for the Senate, borrowing Trump’s catchphrases of a “rigged system” and “drain the swamp” for his announcement video.
Mandel has not looked back. As he runs for U.S. Senate in Ohio, the 44-year-old politician has become one of the nation’s most strident crusaders for Trumpism, melding conspiracy theories and white grievance politics to amass a following that has made him a leading contender for the GOP nomination in this Republican-leaning state.
His political evolution — from a son of suburban Cleveland to warrior for the Make America Great Again movement — isn’t unique. Across the country, rising stars of the pre-Trump era have shed the traditional Republicanism of their past to follow Trump’s far-right brand of politics, cementing the former president’s influence over the next generation of the party’s leaders.
But Mandel’s transformation has been particularly striking. Friends, strategists and supporters who powered his start in public life say that Mandel has so thoroughly rejected his political roots in Cleveland’s liberal-leaning suburbs that he is nearly unrecognizable to them. Some are convinced that his shift began as a clear political calculation — following his party to the right. But with his recent entrenchment on the fringe, many now wonder if it is not just Mandel’s public identity that has changed, but also his beliefs.
“He’s twisting himself into something he wasn’t, just to win an election,” said Cox, who is not a Trump supporter and has donated to Mandel’s opponents. “Telling obvious lies,” Cox said, “is not part of the game. It’s intentional. And you have to believe that, if you say it that often.”
Mandel has burned protective masks and blamed the “deep state” for the pandemic and has claimed that former President Barack Obama runs the current White House. He has rejected the separation of church and state and said he wants to “shut down government schools and put schools in churches and synagogues.” The grandson of Holocaust survivors who were aided by resettlement organizations, he has compared a federal vaccine-or-testing mandate to the actions of the Gestapo, and today’s Afghan refugees to “alligators.”
And he denies that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected. “He is my president,” Mandel said recently in a video, pointing to a Trump sign in an Ohio cornfield.
“I want to believe that this is a character he is playing,” said Rob Zimmerman, a Democrat and former city councilman from Shaker Heights, Ohio. Zimmerman spent hours advising and fundraising for Mandel, viewing him as a politician who could bridge partisan divides. “It is jaw-droppingly different. The Josh Mandel of 2003 — of 2016, even — would not recognize the Josh Mandel of 2021.”
“This,” Zimmerman added, “has broken my heart.”
Mandel declined to be interviewed for this article. Since launching this campaign, his third for the Senate, he has largely spoken through conservative media outlets and his active Twitter feed, which was restricted last year for violating the platform’s rules on “hateful conduct.” (Mandel created a poll asking which “illegals” — either “Muslim Terrorists” or “Mexican Gangbangers” — would commit more crimes.)
Mandel’s stridency has surprised some in Beachwood, an a±uent, predominantly Democratic suburb dotted with synagogues, where Mandel was a quarterback for his high school football team and then married into a wealthy Cleveland family.
Mandel showed an early talent for standing out in a crowd at Ohio State, where he erected a 30-foot inflatable King Kong on the campus green to draw attention to his run for student government and won the presidency, twice.
Shortly after graduating from the School of Law at Case Western Reserve, he won a City Council seat in Lyndhurst, a Cleveland suburb, drawing on support from his tight-knit community. When Albert Ratner, a major real estate developer and Ohio power broker, hosted a fundraiser for Mandel, the candidate made a point of downplaying his Republican affiliation: “I really don’t care about partisanship,” he said, according to several people who recounted the gathering.
Mandel attended just one City Council meeting before deploying to Iraq as an intelligence specialist in the Marine Corps Reserve. On his return trip home, his reentry into U.S. airspace was announced at a high school football game to a cheering crowd.
At 29, he won a seat in the Ohio Legislature, where he showed a keen understanding of the conservative causes that energized party activists. At one point, he took on the state House speaker, a fellow Republican, over a policy requiring ministers who led prayers in the chamber to submit their remarks in advance. The rationale was to avoid proselytizing in the Legislature. Mandel declared it an affront to religious liberty.
“You know who fought the battle for our religious freedom? A 28-year-old Jewish guy,” said Lori Viars, an abortion rights opponent who supports Mandel’s Senate bid. “I was so pleased to see him standing up when really no others did.”