Even by the famously loose standards of what President Trump calls “The Weave” — his long, digressive blend of domestic and foreign policy, sharp observations and schoolyard insults — That Moment in Ohio was startlingly awkward for supporters and critics alike.
It happened on October 12, when the president appeared in Youngstown to campaign for Republican Senator Jon Husted. The Rust Belt city once produced 10 million tons of steel each year, and its reputation has long been built on toughness. The 3,000 people gathered at the Covelli Centre clearly admired that quality in their president.
Husted is solidly built and fit, with evenly balanced features, a prominent forehead and chin, a sleepy-eyed smile and thinning gray hair. He could pass for the friendly owner of a car dealership or dental office. Four decades ago, he was a cornerback at the University of Dayton and played on the Flyers’ 1989 NCAA Division III championship team.
The senator and president were hardly unfamiliar with one another. Roll Call Factbase, an online database, shows that Mr Trump had appeared alongside Husted more than a dozen times over the past decade. Husted, who has held elected office continuously since 2001, was always acknowledged by name. Yet until this month, the president had never said anything particularly memorable about him.
That changed during remarks at Vandalia-Butler High School in Vandalia, Ohio, on October 3, when Mr Trump said he had only just discovered Husted’s football achievements. “Nobody told me you were a great athlete,” the president said. “Now I look at him… different.”
About 30 minutes later, the crowd began chanting Hoo-STED! Hoo-STED! Mr Trump assumed the cheers reflected the audience’s newly acquired appreciation for Husted as an athlete. “They know you’re a good football player now… Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing that. It’s what happens when you’re a football star,” he said.
A football star! That, it seemed, was all the president could think about.
“He was an All-American,” Mr Trump told the audience 40 minutes later.
On October 3, Mr Trump said he had only just learned about Husted’s football achievements. “Nobody told me you were a great athlete,” the president said. “Now I look at him… different.”
Nine days later in Youngstown, Mr Trump returned to the subject less than a minute into his speech. He expressed astonishment that Husted so rarely mentioned his football record. “If I had his football record,” the president joked, “they would have thought I was Jimmy Brown.”
Who?
The president’s impression of the senator had plainly shifted. “He’s, like, become a different man now,” Mr Trump said. But the most jarring moment — the one that reverberated nationwide — came when he described, in front of the crowd, how he had reached that new conclusion.
“I have to say,” the president began, adding, “I don’t do this with men very often,” before explaining: “I started examining his body… up and down. I looked at his ass and I looked at the whole — ”
At that point, the crowd, unsure how else to respond, began laughing.
“— and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws. And I got it. You are a great athlete! I didn’t know that because he doesn’t talk about that. Congratulations. Now they finally know. That was very good.”
No. It was very strange.
A search of the American Presidency Project, the University of California at Santa Barbara’s online archive of presidential papers, found no other example of a president speaking or writing the words I looked at his ass.
The broader presidential record contains only about two dozen uses of the phrase his ass — all attributed to Mr Trump. Most involved other people’s asses being kicked, saved, fired, sued off, thrown in jail, gotten in gear or handed to them. One referred to an unnamed person’s stated intention to “break” Mr Trump’s.
“He’s, like, become a different man now,” Mr Trump said.
Mr Trump returned to Husted’s football career less than a minute into his remarks, saying he was amazed that the senator so rarely mentioned it. Husted is pictured with former NFL coach Jon Gruden.
By the time he returned to Michigan on Sunday, President Trump acknowledged that his previous remarks about the senator’s posterior amounted to ‘my mistake.’
‘In fun, I said I looked at his ass — and I’ve never done that with a man before, it’s true. Off the record,’ he continued before the assembled thousands, ‘women, yes, men, no, okay?’
That yielded to a digression, almost as jaw-dropping, about the nearby hip-hop star who is, rather improbably, one of MAGA’s biggest showbiz supporters.
‘By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj,’ the chief executive said to audience laughter. ‘That’s hard to miss.’
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Then The Weave wove back to Husted. ‘While he’s speaking… I’m examining his body. And I said, “His ass was like a big piece of muscle.” The press went crazy the next day. They said, “What’s with Trump? All he wants to do is talk about a man’s ass.” They didn’t explain the whole football deal.’
Putting aside what good he thought discussion of Jon’s Anatomy would do for the task at hand – persuading Ohio’s Republican/MAGA voters to turn out at the polls on November 3 – we are left to wonder why a politician who has met countless athletes but never descended into such talk would feel compelled to do so now.
Of course, descriptions of the physical attractiveness of both men and women have long figured prominently in the president’s rhetoric, most often preceded or capped by reference to the anointed individual as ‘Central Casting,’ the century-old Hollywood casting firm. Just four days after the first Husted Eruption, the president described Georgia’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, Rick Jackson, as ‘a very handsome, distinguished, beautiful-looking guy.’
As early as March 2016, when John Kasich and Marco Rubio were still competing for the Republican nomination, reporter Peter Alexander, then of NBC News, asked Mr Trump how parents should explain his profanity to children.
‘By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj,’ the chief executive said to audience laughter. ‘That’s hard to miss’
‘Oh, you’re so politically correct. You’re so beautiful. Oh, look at you,’ Mr Trump told Alexander. ‘You’ve never heard a little bad — a little off language… Aren’t you just a perfect young man.’
Perhaps most astonishing – anticipating the Husted Eruption – were Mr Trump’s remarks in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in the closing days of the 2024 cycle.
Leading with a tribute to Latrobe’s most famous son, the late golf legend Arnold Palmer, the former president said he was determined to tell the 3,000 gathered at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport ‘the real story of Arnold.’
‘I love women,’ Mr Trump said, ‘but this guy — this is a guy that was all man… When he took showers with the other pros, they came out there, they said, “Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.”‘
Mr Trump seemed to understand that his rhetoric had crossed some kind of line. ‘I had to say it,’ he professed, semi-apologizing. ‘We have women that are highly sophisticated here. But they used to look at Arnold — this is bad — but he was really something special.’
Contacted by the Associated Press, Palmer’s daughter Peg, then 68, chastised Mr Trump for a ‘poor choice of approaches to remembering my father.’
So what on earth is going on?
MAGA media personalities were quick to dismiss the prospect held out by Occam’s Razor: namely, that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
‘I can’t imagine someone who is more beamingly heterosexual than Donald Trump,’ declared my Newsmax colleague, radio and podcast host Rob Carson.
And the evidence – three marriages, five children, the self-described ‘locker room talk,’ and much else adduced to date – bears this out.
The proper lens for understanding President Trump’s loquacity on other people’s looks is not sexual but generational.
Leading with a tribute to Latrobe’s most famous son, the late golf legend Arnold Palmer, the former president said he was determined to tell the 3,000 gathered at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport ‘the real story of Arnold’
Though he has lost a step since 2024, Mr Trump, at 80, remains vigorous enough to crank up The Weave in different states each night, sometimes twice a day. Sometimes his antics, particularly his gift for cutting comedy, can conjure a younger vibe.
But he will always be a product of mid-century outer-borough New York, a time and place when a man could comment approvingly on the looks of other men – Cary Grant, say, or Jack Kennedy – without his sexuality called immediately into question. Gotham-based TV shows such as ‘Batman’ and ‘The Odd Couple’ depicted male co-occupancy without arousing snickers. None of it flies today.
It’s the same generational heritage that leads the president to reference bygone names such as Jimmy Brown, to employ the New Yorker’s testy coda, Ya understand? or to berate a female reporter for interjecting too frequently with Quiet, piggy.
As a veteran Washington reporter and an outer-borough New Yorker myself, one who came of age with Donald Trump as a daily staple of his media diet, I’ve believed since 2016 that more about the man is explicable by reference to his Big Apple origins than most people – especially his critics – have ever understood.
Ya understand?
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author, most recently, of Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.
