Trump had the crowd in Youngstown, Ohio, laughing Monday night when he admitted he had been checking out Senator Jon Husted’s body, backside included.
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Trump was at the Covelli Centre rallying support for Husted and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy when he turned his attention to the senator, and the compliment took a turn nobody in the arena saw coming.
“But I’m standing over here, and I don’t do this with men very often,” Trump said. “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 [expletive] 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.”
The room broke into laughter. Trump kept going, telling the crowd, “I didn’t know that because he doesn’t talk about that,” before adding, “He’s like a piece of steel.”
The tip came from Jon Gruden. The former Super Bowl winning coach introduced Trump at the rally and told him that he and Husted played football together at the University of Dayton. “And it was Jon Gruden that told me that,” Trump said. “He’s a fantastic man. He’s a very respected guy.”
Gruden was not exaggerating. Before politics, Jon Husted was an All American defensive back at Dayton, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and he was part of the Flyers team that won the 1989 Division III national championship.
The clip spread fast online, and the jokes followed. Mississippi Press Association executive director Layne Bruce responded with deadpan sarcasm, writing that it was all perfectly normal and there was nothing unusual about it at all. Former Republican operative Tim Miller joked that someone should post a good picture of Husted’s backside so the public could judge for themselves.
Behind the punchline, Trump was in Ohio for a serious reason. Jon Husted is in one of the tightest Senate races in the country with the midterm elections just weeks away. Husted was appointed to the seat JD Vance left when he became vice president, so this is the first time Ohio voters will decide whether he keeps it. His opponent is Democrat Sherrod Brown, the former senator who lost his own seat to Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024 and is now trying to get back to Washington.
Trump also took aim at Brown during the rally, telling the crowd Brown “was here during a very dark period for our country.”