Donald Trump flew to Greenville, North Carolina, on Tuesday, Oct. 20, to sell Senate candidate Michael Whatley. He spent part of the night on Jon Husted’s ass.
“I’m studying his body. I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it, of course,” Trump told the crowd at Pitt-Greenville Airport, according to NBC News. He called the Ohio Republican’s backside “a pile of muscle,” noted that his feet are big and said a tap on Husted’s shoulder “actually hurt my hand.”
It was at least the third time in nine days the president turned a campaign speech into an appraisal of the 59-year-old senator. And the loudest defense of the bit says more about how men get policed than anything Trump said onstage.
Trump’s Jon Husted riff, from Youngstown to Greenville
The routine started Oct. 12 at the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio. Trump said former NFL coach Jon Gruden had told him Husted was a standout at the University of Dayton, where Husted played defensive back. “I don’t do this with men very often,” Trump said, per Mediaite’s transcript, before describing how he looked at Husted’s ass and hands (“He’s got these, like, claws”). Later that night he added the jawline.
Five days later in Highland Heights, Kentucky, the inventory grew to shoulders, feet and jaw. Husted’s shoulder was “like a piece of steel,” Trump said. “I’m still recovering.”
Husted has mostly played along. “I know the president’s been talking about me as a football player and a few other things these days,” he told a Darke County GOP hog roast on Oct. 18, CNN reported. Ohio’s other Republican senator, Bernie Moreno, was blunter: “Unlike the president of the United States, I will not comment on his anatomy.”
Husted isn’t the only man getting graded. At an Oct. 16 rally in Georgia, Trump said he didn’t think Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff was good-looking, then called Republican challenger Mike Collins “a good-looking man, and he’s all man.”
Jesse Watters says Trump gets a pass “because he’s straight”
The day after Youngstown, Fox News host Jesse Watters took up the clip on “The Five.” “Trump says a lot of stuff we all think and we don’t say. Sometimes it sounds a little gay,” Watters said, according to TV Insider. “But he can get away with it because he’s straight.” He then brought up seeing Sen. John Thune in a locker room.
Watters is one of cable news’ most reliable enforcers of who counts as a real man. He told Vice President JD Vance on air that he skipped fudge on National Fudge Day because it would be “too gay.” He has also told viewers, “I need to know if someone is gay.”
So let’s be precise about the problem. A man admiring another man’s body is fine, and none of this tells you anything about anyone’s sexuality. The issue is the rule Watters just said out loud: the same words are harmless coming from a man with the right credentials and suspect coming from everyone else. Queer men, femme men and the Democrats Watters likes to mock don’t get that exemption. The compliment never changed. Only the permission did.
Husted’s LGBTQ+ record gets less airtime than his shoulders
The body talk is a sideshow in a race with real stakes for queer Ohioans. Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Husted, then lieutenant governor, to JD Vance’s Senate seat in January 2025. Husted publicly backed House Bill 68, which restricts gender-affirming care for minors and bars trans girls from girls’ school sports, and criticized DeWine’s December 2023 veto of it. Lawmakers overrode the veto in January 2024. Equality Ohio’s 2026 scorecard also says Husted previously supported efforts to ban same-sex marriage.
His opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and has the Human Rights Campaign’s endorsement. He isn’t beyond criticism. LGBTQ+ leaders in Ohio faulted his 2024 campaign over an ad on transgender issues, The Buckeye Flame reported.
Anti-trans messaging is a core part of the Republican closing pitch in Ohio. A Buckeye Flame review published by The Advocate counted nine references to transgender issues at Trump’s Youngstown rally, compared with zero at a Democratic rally in the same city that day. At that same event, Trump claimed without evidence that Brown wants “men” playing in women’s sports, PinkNews reported.
Ohio Senate special election: Brown vs. Husted on Nov. 3, 2026
Ohio voters decide on Nov. 3 who serves the rest of Vance’s term, which ends in January 2029. A CNN poll of likely voters, taken Sept. 29 to Oct. 5, had Brown at 49% and Husted at 43%, with a margin of error of 4.5 points. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, so Ohio is one of the races that decides who controls the chamber next year.
Trump will likely keep telling the Husted story, because crowds keep laughing. The record that matters to queer Ohioans is already public: Husted’s support for HB 68 is on file, and so is Brown’s DOMA vote.