Former President Trump highlighted the size of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitalia during a rally Saturday evening in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state that will be decisive in determining which party wins the White House in a little more than two weeks.
The rally took place in Latrobe, Pa., the birthplace of Palmer, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest golfers of all time and who died in 2016 at the age of 87. Although it is common for political candidates to name-check hometown heroes during their travels, Trump’s focus on Palmer’s genitalia was peculiar.
“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,” Trump told cheering supporters at a rally at a regional airport named after Palmer. “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.’ ”
The campaign of Trump’s rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, mocked the former president’s comment.
“Trump’s Pennsylvania Closing Argument Is Literal Junk,” Harris’ campaign said in a statement. “In a Pennsylvania rally speech his campaign team billed as ‘the beginning of his closing argument in the final stretch,’ Donald Trump focused on the issue most important to voters in this election: a deceased golfer’s … anatomy.”
During the rally Saturday, the former president also described Harris as “a s— vice president” while urging his supporters to vote in a state that has the most electoral votes of any battleground state in the nation.
One of Trump’s senior advisors told reporters before Saturday’s rally that the former president would use his appearance in Latrobe to begin introducing his final message to voters ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
An average of recent Pennsylvania polling has Trump leading by less than 1 percentage point, according to Real Clear Politics, and both candidates and their surrogates have been campaigning heavily in the commonwealth in the closing weeks of the election.
It’s not the first time Trump has referenced penis size while campaigning. In 2016, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida responded to Trump dubbing him “Little Marco” because of his height by mocking the size of Trump’s hands.
Noting that Trump was taller than him, “I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5-2,” Rubio said during a rally. “And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can’t trust them.”
Trump responded at a March 2016 debate by raising his hands and spreading his fingers for viewers to see.
“Look at those hands, are they small hands?” he said. “And, he referred to my hands: ‘If they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”
Harris, meanwhile, campaigned in Detroit and Atlanta on Saturday, major cities in two other critical states in the November election.
At an evening rally in Georgia, the vice president spoke about Trump’s role in overturning the federal right to abortion and the death of Amber Nicole Thurman. The 28-year-old single mother died after a delayed routine surgical procedure at a suburban Atlanta hospital after a rare post-abortion complication, according to ProPublica.
The delayed care occurred in the aftermath of a new state law that criminalized performing the procedure to remove fetal tissue from the uterus with few exceptions, legislation that reproductive-rights advocates said could scare away doctors from performing the surgery for fear of prosecution.
“Donald Trump still refuses to take accountability, to take any accountability, for the pain and the suffering he has caused, or even to just acknowledge the pain and suffering that has actually happened. In a Fox News town hall last week, he even mocked Thurman’s family for sharing their story,” Harris said at the rally, before showing footage of Trump talking about a press conference Thurman’s family and Democratic politicians held before the former president spoke at the town hall last week focused on female voters.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Trump told Fox News host Harris Faulkner. “We’ll get better ratings, I promise.”
Harris described Trump’s response as demonstrative of the Republican’s core values.
“What we see continually from Donald Trump is exactly what that clip shows,” she said. “He belittles their sorrow, making it about himself and his television ratings. It is cruel.”
