Donald Trump opened his latest rally in Pennsylvania by paying tribute to Arnold Palmer for several minutes — before sharing an anecdote about the late golf legend’s anatomy.
While campaigning at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport on Friday, Oct. 19, the 78-year-old former U.S. president called Palmer “one of the greatest golfers in the world” before he launched into 12 minutes of talkabout the athlete, including an eventual aside in which he appeared to allude to Palmer’s genitalia.
“But Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that with all due respect to women, and I love women,” Trump said during the appearance, just weeks before Election Day. “But this guy, this is a guy [who] was all man. This man was strong, and I refuse 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.’ “
After laughing to himself, Trump told his crowd that he “had to say it.”
“We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man,” he said. “But he was really something special. Arnold was something special.”
Donald Trump appears at his campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on Oct. 19, 2024.
Win McNamee/Getty
Earlier in the speech, Trump said that Palmer knew how to “electrify” a crowd and imagined what it would be like to have him present at the rally over the weekend. Palmer died in 2016 at age 87.
“If I had him here right now with me, this crowd would be going absolutely crazy,” Trump said. “They’d say ‘Trump, get off the stage, we want Arnold Palmer to speak.’ He would electrify a crowd, and he would go for shots that nobody else would do. And they were risky as hell, sometimes it wouldn’t work out, but usually it did with him.”
Speaking with the Associated Press on Sunday, Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears, said she wasn’t upset by Trump’s remarks, but called them “a poor choice of approaches” to honoring the late golfer’s memory.
She added that Trump and Palmer shared “an interest in golf and a love of golf” and that her father “believed in the Republican Party.”
“There’s nothing much to say. I’m not really upset,” the 68-year-old said. “I think it was a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father, but what are you going to do?”
“A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about what my father would say about something or what’s happening,” she continued. “We didn’t always agree on things, but he was a quintessential American who believed fervently in this country, even when he questioned its direction.”
Speaking with The Sporting News in 2018, as reported by The Daily Beast, the athlete’s daughter once told the outlet that Palmer once “made a sound of disgust” when he saw Trump on television once.
“Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust — like ‘uck’ or ‘ugg’ — like he couldn’t believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in,” she said of her father, who was previously friendly with Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Then he said, ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was,’ and walked out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”
Palmer’s daughter added at the time that her dad would join Trump for charity fundraisers and events at his golf courses, and that he had “no patience for people who demean other people in public.”
Trump’s latest campaign event — during which he also referred to Kamala Harris as a “s— vice president” — was teased as one that would preview his closing arguments against Harris and “start to get into that framing,” according to senior adviser Jason Miller, per the AP.
Both Harris and Trump are continuing on their respective campaign trails ahead of Election Day on Nov. 5.
