Trump Dropped a Number in Ohio That Sherrod Brown Does Not Want Voters to Remember

Trump stood in Youngstown and did the math on Sherrod Brown out loud.

Brown filed that request with Senate budget writers for the 2024 fiscal year.

The dollar figure and the reason behind it are exactly what Trump wants printed on every mailer in Ohio.

The Earmark Request Brown Filed for a Columbus Nonprofit

Brown asked Senate appropriators for $750,000 in his fiscal year 2024 spending requests.

The money was earmarked for Harmony Project Productions, a Columbus nonprofit, to renovate a performance and programming space.

The request carried Brown's signature under a line called the Harmony Center Project.

Fox News Digital sent written questions about the request directly to Brown's office.

The office never answered them.

Earmarks like this one move through the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, which rarely draws outside scrutiny.

That subcommittee process is exactly why voters never hear about most of these requests until a reporter or a rival campaign goes digging.

Congress brought earmarks back in 2021 and promised the sunlight would stop the old abuses.

Instead a $750,000 drag queen line item sailed straight through Brown's signature without anyone blinking.

A Drag Queen Story Time Event Turned a Line Item Into a Campaign Weapon

That same nonprofit posted video in January of a drag queen singing and reading books to children for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event.

Drag performer Ava Aurora Foxx said the event was meant to share "love and beliefs" with the kids in attendance.

Parents in multiple states have fought to keep children away from similar drag performances.

Trump brought the file to a Youngstown stage and read the dollar figure out loud.

"Now think of that," Trump told the crowd. "He wants $750,000 so that drag queens in school can read to our children."

He tied it to a longer list, claiming Brown voted to cut farmers out of farm loans, pushed a bill letting men into battered women's shelters, opposed the Keystone pipeline, and backed sanctuary cities.

Trump closed by telling Ohio to send Jon Husted to the Senate instead of letting Brown "slither his way back into power."

None of those other claims carry a dollar figure attached to a children's event, which is exactly why the earmark is the one voters will remember at the ballot box.

https://twitter.com/Republicans/status/2109813086584524912

Brown built his reputation over a long Senate career as a supposed blue collar populist, and this is the receipt Republicans will wave at every union hall between now and November.

Ohio Republicans Found Their Closing Argument in One Line of a Spending Bill

Washington Examiner once cataloged a list of similar woke pork projects buried in federal spending bills, and Brown's drag queen earmark fits right on it.

Most senators bury a line like this one and bank on nobody checking, and Brown bet wrong.

Trump just pulled one line out of a federal budget document and read it back to the people paying for it.

Husted does not need to invent a contrast with Brown when Brown already wrote one into a spending bill with his name attached.

Drag story hours already rank among the clearest dividing lines in American politics because they put somebody else's politics in a room with somebody else's kids.

Brown's campaign had every chance to explain the earmark to Fox News Digital and chose silence instead.

Silence works until a former president reads your spending request out loud in front of several thousand people.

Public polling already has Husted ahead of Brown in the closing weeks of the race, and Brown just handed him one more reason why.

Ohio voters fired Brown once already, and a $750,000 line item for drag queen story time is a strange way to ask for a second chance.

Sources:

• Breitbart News, "Trump Warns Ohioans: Democrat Sherrod Brown Requested 750000 Earmark for Drag Queen Story Hour for Children," Breitbart, October 13, 2026.
• Fox News Digital, "Ohio Democrat Earmarked a Six Figure Amount to Group That Promoted Drag Queen Song and Story Time," Fox News, 2026.
• Washington Examiner, "6 Examples of Woke Pork Projects in Omnibus Spending Bill," Washington Examiner, 2026.
• Free Beacon, "Ohio Republican Jon Husted Leads Democratic Rival Sherrod Brown in Crucial 2026 Senate Race," Free Beacon, 2026.