Donald Trump at a Fox News town hall
(Megan Varner/Getty)

‘This is a guy that was all man:’ Donald Trump has an incredibly weird Arnold Palmer story, and if we had to hear it, you do, too

Donald Trump is proving again and again that he doesn’t have the capabilities to be president. To give yet another example out of so many, on Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he opened a rally with a bewildering, characteristically unhinged ramble about the private parts of golfer Arnold Palmer.

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Trump was in the same city the famous golfer grew up in, and as we all know he’s a fan of golf, so a shout-out to Palmer’s legacy wouldn’t have been weird. But the focus on his genitals? Extremely weird.

“Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man,” he told a crowd of his supporters, who clapped and cheered along, according to LA Times. “This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.”

Trump is obsessed with being “manly” himself, and his fans inexplicably hold him up as a symbol of American masculinity. (Where the face full of makeup comes into it, who knows?) And as we all know, his brand of “manly” comes with the oppression of women and the rollback of reproductive rights. MAGA member Greg Gutfield, for example, doesn’t believe that “real men” should vote for Harris. Trump’s ideology is toxic masculinity taken to its distressing extreme.

The penis story isn’t the only weird thing (keep calling him weird—he hates it) to come out of the Pennsylvania rally. Trump also crudely insulted Kamala Harris, calling her “a s**t vice president.” Harris appears to be taking this in stride, not that she should have to, but that’s the reality we’re currently living in.

“The President of the United States must set a standard,” she told Rev. Al Sharpton in an interview on Sunday, after he brought up Trump’s comment. “Not only for our nation but understanding the standard that we as a nation must set for the world.” Trump categorically failed to do this during his four years as president. Harris went on:

We representing the United States of America walk into rooms around the world with the earned and self-appointed authority to talk about the importance of democracy, of rule of law and have been thought of as a role model—imperfect though we may be, but a role model—of what it means to be committed to certain standards, including international rules and norms, but also standards of decorum. And what you see in my opponent, a former President of the United States, demeans the office.

There are 14 days to go until the election and the race is by all accounts distressingly close. Some people seem bewilderingly unaware that a presidential candidate rambling about the penis size of a golfer and insulting his opponent is not normal behavior.


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Sarah Barrett
Sarah Barrett (she/her) is a freelance writer with The Mary Sue who has been working in journalism since 2014. She loves to write about movies, even the bad ones. (Especially the bad ones.) The Raimi Spider-Man trilogy and the Star Wars prequels changed her life in many interesting ways. She lives in one of the very, very few good parts of England.