Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio Bernie Moreno told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday that establishment Republicans are targeting him because former President Donald Trump has “weighed in on the race” and spoken positively of him.
Moreno, a businessman and immigrant from Colombia, caught up with host and Breitbart News Washington Bureau chief Matthew Boyle on Saturday, days after establishment Republicans levied a smear against his background and credibility.
“Well, I mean, they’re coming after me for the obvious reason that President Trump has weighed in on the race, and so once you’re viewed as a ‘Trump candidate,’ the establishment goes crazy,” he explained. “I mean, these are the same people that go back to the times of Kasich not wanting to come into the convention center during the RNC in Cleveland 2016. I call them the pathologically anti-Trump. They just can’t get over the fact that he defeated the Bush dynasty, and by the way, that did something that… had never been done before in Washington, DC. He actually kept his promises and put in place a conservative agenda and they’re scared to death that that’s what will happen in 25’ when we regain the levers of power and get this country back on track.”
Speaking anonymously, establishment Republicans claimed to DailyMail that Moreno is the second coming of embattled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who has taken heat for lying about his background, and that he had made inconsistent comments surrounding the dynamics of his upbringing as an immigrant. Specifically, operatives contended that because his family was wealthy before leaving Colombia, his family’s struggle when arriving in the United States was a fabrication. However, Boyle analyzed his past comments and documents in a report published Friday, determining both aspects of the story are true and Moreno did not fabricate his family’s struggles:
The core of the case is that these anonymous establishment Republicans argue that Moreno saying his mother and family lived in “outsized privilege” in Colombia before coming to the United States and struggling here was somehow inconsistent and was somehow like Santos’s famous fabulist tendencies. But documents that the Daily Mail reviewed—also obtained by Breitbart News—show that both of Moreno’s central claims about his background are in fact true. When the Moreno family moved to the United States in the early 1970s, his father was a renowned surgeon in Colombia—but he could only get a job as a “surgical assistant” at a South Florida hospital with a meager salary just north of $10,000 a year. In today’s dollars, that’s about $70,000—and with a family of nine, as Moreno’s parents had seven children—that is a very modest and minimal income that would suggest they struggled before he eventually got his medical license here in the United States.
Moreno delved into his background with Breitbart News in greater detail.
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“So my, my parents, both on my mom’s side and my dad’s side, were very well off, which is typical in South American countries – you have, you know, the very wealthy and the poor,” he said. “There’s not a middle class. That’s where we’re heading in America, by the way, which is why we need to grow our middle class, but my parents were very well off—typical Latin Catholic family. My grandfather was one of 23 kids. My dad was one of 11, we had seven kids in my family, and my mom and dad decided that they wanted to bring our family to America, the one place on Earth where your destiny is determined not by who your parents were or your family situation, but rather, what you’re able to dream, what your perseverance is, what your work ethic is, merit. So we moved to the U.S. in late 1971, just before my fifth birthday, and my parents left a life of privilege behind for a very different life in America.”
He highlighted that the $10,000 salary his father, a renowned doctor and once the secretary of health in Colombia, earned as a “surgical assistant” was actually an estimate, noting his compensation was $5.25 per hour. Moreno recalled tagging along with his mother to sell trinkets and that he and his numerous siblings began working as soon as they could.
“My dad had to drive in the middle of the night to do rounds with medical students – where he had been to the medical school, he had been been the Secretary of Health and came to the U.S. and what I call rebooted our lives. My mom would take us to the flea market on Saturdays to sell trinkets, Colombian trinkets. We had to work, deliver newspapers when I was 12, bag groceries when I was 14, did landscaping, busboy because my mom and dad were about giving us a loving household and a great education, but everything else was on us. So…we had to work from the moment we were physically able and legally allowed to work, we went to work. And that’s how we grew up.”
This upbringing, Moreno said, gave him a first-hand perspective of the “American Dream and what true conservatism is all about, which is that the government shouldn’t determine where our lives are; we can determine, we can govern ourselves.”
Moreno recounted moving to Cleveland in the 2000s. With loans and his life savings, he purchased a “tiny little car dealership that was selling four cars a month.”
“We immediately got the place selling 80 plus cars a month. I eventually became the largest seller of luxury automobiles in the Midwest and then built the 75th largest dealer group in America,” he detailed.
“And I’ll tell [you], this hit piece in DailyMail reminds me of when I got to Cleveland and… the word on the street was that I was laundering money for the Colombian drug cartels because, heaven forbid, a Colombian immigrant could become incredibly successful. That had to be an excuse,” he added. “That kind of stuff doesn’t bother me. I’ve dealt with it my whole life. I look at that as somebody else’s problem. It’s just sad to see Republicans playing that kind of game and that they’re that desperate to try to knock me out. It’s sad for them. And… I take it with a grain of salt.”
Moreno is joined in the primary field by establishment Republican State Sen. Matt Dolan. Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians – a Major League Baseball team formerly known as the “Cleveland Indians” until the Dolans changed it in 2021 amid mounting pressure from the left – placed third in last year’s GOP primary in the Buckeye state, losing to Trump-backed candidate now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who went on to win the general election.
Moreover, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who received Trump’s endorsement in 2022, is also reportedly weighing a run. Earlier this week, his recent comments downplaying the power of Trump surfaced in a Politico article.