‘I looked at his ass’: The truth about Trump’s sudden fixation with other men’s bodies, revealed by JAMES ROSEN

Even by the loose standards of The Weave, as President Trump calls his speeches – those long, digressive cocktails of domestic and foreign policy, brilliant insights and schoolyard put-downs – the sheer awkwardness of That Moment in Ohio, for fans and critics alike, was jarring.

It was October 12 and the president was campaigning for Republican Senator Jon Husted in Youngstown: the Rust Belt community that once annually produced ten million tons of steel, a tough place for tough people. The 3,000 attendees who packed the Covelli Centre love their president for his toughness.

Husted is stout and fit with blandly symmetrical features. With his prominent forehead and chin, sleepy-eyed smile and thinning gray hair, Husted looks like the affable owner of a car dealership or dental practice. Forty years ago, he played cornerback at the University of Dayton, part of the Flyers’ 1989 NCAA Division III championship team.

When he and the president met at Youngstown, they were not strangers. According to the online database maintained by Roll Call Factbase, Mr Trump had shared a stage with Husted, who has held elective office continuously since 2001, more than a dozen times over a decade, always acknowledging him by name. But Mr Trump had never said anything memorable about him – until this month.

In remarks at Vandalia-Butler High School in Vandalia, Ohio on October 3, Mr Trump disclosed that he had just learned of Husted’s gridiron heroics. ‘Nobody told me you were a great athlete,’ the president said. ‘Now I look at him… different.’

A half-hour later, the president prompted cheering: Hoo-STED! Hoo-STED! He thought the crowd gazed upon their junior senator in the same new light that he did: ‘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.’

A football star! It was all the president could think about.

‘He was an all-American,’ Mr Trump told the audience forty minutes later. 

Nine days later, in Youngstown, Mr Trump decided to lean heavily into the football star business, raising it less than a minute into his remarks, professing amazement at how seldom Husted bragged about it. ‘If I had his football record,’ the president joked, ‘they would have thought I was Jimmy Brown.’

Who?

His entire view of the senator had changed. ‘He’s, like, become a different man now,’ Mr Trump said. But the truly jarring moment, the one that reverberated nationwide, came when he shared aloud the mechanics of this new sizing-up.

‘I have to say,’ the president began, adding ‘I don’t do this with men very often’ before revealing: ‘I started examining his body… up and down. I looked at his ass and I looked at the whole — ‘

Here the crowd, not knowing what else to do, 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, that was very weird.

A search of the American Presidency Project, the online database of all the presidents’ papers maintained by the University of California at Santa Barbara, finds, unsurprisingly, no other instance when a chief executive spoke or wrote the words I looked at his ass.

Indeed, the annals of the presidency record only two dozen uses of the phrase his ass – all from Mr Trump. Most referred to other people’s asses being kicked, saved, fired, sued off, thrown in jail, gotten in gear or handed to them, but one cited the stated intention of an unnamed individual to ‘break’ Mr Trump’s.

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.’

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.

‘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.

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.