Battle For The Senate, 2024: Meet Bernie Moreno, Another Republican Who Cannot Speak Without Lying

Battleground Ohio

Trump has promised an “upper class tax cut if he gets back into the White House. He can’t do that without a compliant right-wing Congress. Yesterday, we ran a guest post by Conor O’Callaghan, a likely freshman to replace a MAGA Republican in Arizona. He has a very different vision of tax policy than Trump does, far more in line with Biden’s and with another likely freshman, Diane Young, also a tax policy expert, who is likely to replace MAGA Republican John James in Michigan. None of these candidates are going to Congress to enact tax cuts for the rich. The chances for the Democrats to flip the House look better than even.

The Senate is more of a problem. The DSCC is defending vulnerable incumbents in states Trump won both times (Montana and Ohio) and won in 2016 and almost won in 2020 (Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin). And then there are open seats in two swing states (Michigan and Arizona) and one deep red state (West Virginia). The DSCC is making a half-assed effort to probe GOP defenses in Florida and Texas and “waiting to see if anything happens” in Missouri. They may even have to defend a solid blue seat in Maryland, where Ben Cardin is retiring and where a completely worthless mega-millionaire, David Trone, has spent over $54 million (so far) to buy a seat but probably can’t beat the state’s popular former Republican governor, Larry Hogan. It’s a disaster scenario for the Democrats from coast to coast and it’s nearly impossible to see them keeping control of the upper chamber, where the DSCC has gotten behind atrocious candidates in Michigan (Elissa Slotkin), Florida (Debbie Mucasel-Powell) and this anti-working class loser, Glenn Elliott, in West Virginia

But Republicans have bad candidate problems of their own— in pretty much every single race. One interesting one is Ohio, where the Democrats have a strong incumbent in Sherrod Brown and the Republican nominee is a rich, very sleazy car salesman, Bernie Moreno. Moreno is another self-funder, who has already spent $4.5 million of his own to buy the seat. He’s also extremely dishonest and an opportunistic flip-flopper, who went from self-righteous anti-Trump die-hard to MAGA fanatic in the blink of an eye. Like all closet cases do, Moreno has learned how to lie his way through life. 

Yesterday, Jonathan Weisman, Patricia Mazzei and Simón Posada took a look under the hood. “He is running for the Senate,” they wrote, “as an immigrant who made good, reaching out to Ohio voters with a stirring, only-in-America bootstraps story: arriving as a child from Colombia, taking a risk on a struggling business, and then turning it into a smashing success and himself into a millionaire 100 times over. Running under the banner of 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, 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 Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.”

Simply put, Bernie Moreno is never going to have any problem helping Trump pass an “upper class tax cut.” Or ten of them. Despite the way he tries to spin it back in Ohio, “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 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. Political candidates seeking office for the first time necessarily engage in a calculated process of self-creation, carefully sifting through their past and deciding what to emphasize, what to minimize, what to be ready to explain and, in many cases, what they hope no one will find out. Needless to say, it helps to give voters as much as possible to find relatable and as little as possible to find alienating or hard to understand. For Moreno, the way he has framed his biography— and the material that he has omitted from the frame— reflects a keen awareness of the political reality in the Trump-era Republican Party, in Ohio, and in a contest with the rumpled Brown, a Democrat (and a doctor’s Yale-educated son) who has survived in an increasingly red state by holding himself out as a champion of the working class.

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In an Ohio hit hard by economic globalization and the decline of heavy manufacturing, a candidate from the South American elite might feel like a stretch. Instead, Moreno describes how he bet his life savings in 2005 on a small, underperforming Mercedes-Benz dealership on Cleveland’s West Side, turning what could be a liability in courting the working class— fabulous wealth, with assets valued up to $105.7 million and yearly income nearing $6 million— into proof of his own hard work and entrepreneurial street smarts.

As such political autobiographies go, it is powerful in a state where Republican successes of late have come from the drift of former steel towns in Northeast Ohio, the coal belt of Appalachia and heavy industries of Northern Ohio toward Trump. For the broader GOP, his journey also bolsters the party’s appeal to Latino voters and to first-generation immigrants striving for a better life.

But the Morenos’ story is not a typical American immigrant’s tale… The Morenos’ immigration narrative is also atypical in that they were not strangers to the country when they arrived: The candidate’s father, Bernardo Moreno Sr., had studied gastroenterology, earned a master’s degree in surgery and had done his medical residency all at the University of Pennsylvania, where Bernie Moreno’s eldest three siblings were born. His mother, Marta Moreno, had earned a degree from Stanford.

In Colombia, Dr. Moreno had been the country’s equivalent of the secretary of health, and he and his wife enjoyed what Bernie Moreno described as considerable generational wealth on both sides: multiple properties, farms, servants, staff and a house in Bogotá so prominent that it was later converted to the German ambassador’s residence.

…“Colombian millionaires don’t leave Colombia to live the American dream or to prevent their children from growing up with privileges,” said Federico Gómez Lara, editor in chief of Cambio Colombia, a magazine of current affairs and politics, and a grandson of Dorita Salive. “They leave Colombia because they have enough money to throw away. Colombia seems like a village to them, and they want their children to be educated and mingle with the real rich.”

In a friendly interview in Colombia earlier this year with the journalist Patricia Lara Salive, Gomez’s mother and the heiress to one of the nation’s largest fortunes, Bernie Moreno’s brother Roberto said that his parents had intended to stay in Florida only briefly while the children learned English, but Dr. Moreno’s rapid ascent at Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, coupled with their daughter’s marriage to an American, changed their plans.

“I want my children to learn English and get to know another culture,” Roberto Moreno quoted his mother as saying. “Let’s go to Florida for a while.”

“A while was supposed to be one or two years,” added Roberto Moreno, who studied engineering at the University of Florida. But their father joined them after four months and took the medical board exams to practice medicine in Florida. “And so we stayed there.”

Moreno, as a candidate for office, speaks often of the cramped, two-bedroom apartment in Florida where his parents and their seven children first took up residence. That first home, purchased in 1971 with a mortgage worth more than $300,000 in today’s dollars, was a three-bedroom condominium in a new, 15-story high-rise on the ocean in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea… advertised as having “300 feet of your own private beach,” a “wide deck for sunning,” a pool, a putting green and a sauna.

Within two months, Bernie Moreno’s step-grandfather had lent the family the money to move to a four-bedroom house in Pompano Beach with a pool on a canal, ocean access and a two-car garage.

…In past interviews, Mr. Moreno has captured the contradictions of his childhood. In a podcast before his political career took off, he alluded to just how wealthy his family had been in Colombia and why his mother decided to give up that privilege.

“We were being raised in an entitled way, and she didn’t want us to be raised that way,” he said in the podcast. “So she packed up 23 suitcases, seven kids, and flew to Fort Lauderdale.”

After Trump endorsed Moreno, he managed to win every single county in the state for a smashing primary rout of his 2 better-known opponents. Soon after the primary, The Guardian first reported that Moreno’s background story— the he had fled socialism in Colombia— was just another one of his self-serving lies. for one thing, Colombia didn’t have a socialist government when his family left; it has a right-of-center government, one that his own family was connected to. He was just lying and misleading people, as he always does, and assuming no one would fact-check him. 

All the polling shows Brown beating Moreno, even with Trump beating Biden in the state. The most recent one was conducted in mid-March before he locked up the nomination and had Brown winning 47-36%, but everone acknowledges that that is likely to narrow considerably.