Donald Trump has been making the rounds, campaigning for Republican candidates ahead of the November 3rd election, and the traits he admires in an elected official may not match what voters care about. He recently went viral for praising Senator Jon Husted’s body during an event.
There’s a certain irony in these comments coming from someone whose party (and more specifically, whose administration) has actively worked to erode LGBTQ+ rights, and people noticed.
However, this isn’t the first time Trump has expressed admiration for men he sees as strong and powerful. The startling part is how often he focuses on their bodies rather than their business acumen or political skills.
Trump Says He Checked Out Senator Husted’s Rear End
Trump went viral for the moment he started describing his admiration for Husted, who currently represents Ohio in the U.S. Senate and is running for re-election.
However, he didn’t start with Husted’s policy positions, or legislation the Senator has sponsored, or how Husted would make life better for Ohioans. Instead, he started by telling the story of Coach John Gruden telling him what a great football player Husted was, and then offered his own assessment of Husted’s greatness.
Husted wasn’t elected to the Senate for his first term; he was appointed to fill J.D. Vance’s seat when Vance left to become Vice President. Trump says Husted hasn’t “been there that long,” but “has to stay,” then goes into story mode.
“I called him up last week, and he was talking, I’m standing right over here as I do with candidates…and I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete and I looked and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass and I looked at the whole 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!”
Trump seems to realize, even as he starts this story, that he’s about to say something people might see as a little odd. (Physique is pretty low on the list of priorities for most voters in an elected representative, right?) He even interrupts his own spiel to tell the audience that he doesn’t often look at men this way.
That raises the obvious question: Is this actually unusual for him?
Anderson Cooper Collected The Snippets — There Are Plenty
Naturally, someone had to investigate, and Wednesday night, Anderson Cooper dropped what may be the definitive collection of moments when Trump praises another man’s body.
There are quite a few, as you can see in the clip below.
Over and over, Trump describes how “handsome” he finds various men. There’s another clip of him talking about checking out Husted’s posterior (as well as his shoulders and feet), and then there’s this:
“You can’t miss, big, strong, handsome Oklahoma studs.”
About another football player, New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, Trump goes into raptures:
“I’m look at the legs of, he’s this big beautiful guy, got legs like tree trunks.”
He even briefly fantasizes about how other men felt sharing a shower room with Arnold Palmer.
Again, It’s The Hypocrisy
Men are certainly welcome to admire other men’s bodies. People can be attracted to others and can objectively recognize beauty, strength, and talent in people they aren’t attracted to.
However, Trump represents the party that fights against the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
In his first weeks in office, he revoked a slate of executive orders, including “Presidential Memorandum of February 4, 2021 (Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World).” In his previous term, he opposed the Equality Act, a piece of legislation that would help protect LGBTQ+ people from harmful discrimination. NBC reported that his administration claimed it was “filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights.”
Under his party’s rule, books are being removed from school libraries because politicians claim that seeing two male penguins raise a baby penguin together, or knowing that some kids have two moms, is harmful indoctrination.
Meanwhile, the President of the United States checking out some guy’s body and telling voters that a specific seat-of-the-pants belongs in a Senate seat is apparently just an average day.
