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.
During a campaign event at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport on Friday, October 19, the 78-year-old former US president called Palmer “one of the greatest golfers in the world” before launching into a 12-minute conversation about the athlete, including a possible aside seemed to allude to Palmer’s genitalia.
“But Arnold Palmer was just a man. And I say that with all due respect to women, and I love women,” Trump said during an appearance just weeks before Election Day. “But this guy, this is the guy [who] was all man. This man was strong, and I refuse to say it, but when he was in the shower with the other pros, they came out of there and said, ‘Oh my God. It’s incredible.’ ”
After chuckling to himself, Trump told his audience that he “had to say it.”
“We have women here who are very sophisticated, but they looked at Arnold as a man,” he said. “But he really was something special. Arnold was something special.”
Melania and Donald Trump have mixed reactions to Jim Gaffigan’s bold dinner joke Access to Hollywood Tape
Donald Trump appears at his campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on October 19, 2024.
Win McNamee/Getty
Earlier in the speech, Trump said Palmer knew how to “electrify” a crowd and imagined what it would be like to have him at the rally over the weekend. Palmer died in 2016 at the age of 87.
“If he was here with me right now, this crowd would go absolutely nuts,” Trump said. “They would say ‘Trump, get off the stage, we want Arnold Palmer to speak.’ He would electrify the crowd and go for shots that no one else would, and they were hella risky, sometimes it wouldn’t work, but usually it’s with him.”
In a conversation with the Associated Press on Sunday, Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears, said she was not upset by Trump’s remarks, but called them a “poor approach” 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 is not much to say. I’m not really upset,” said the 68-year-old. “I think that was a poor choice of approach to my father’s memory, but what are you going to do?”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what my father would say about something or what’s going on,” she continued. “We didn’t always agree on things, but he was a quintessential American who believed passionately in this country, even when he doubted its direction.”
Never miss a story — subscribe to PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2)/Donald-Trump--57-10152024-c821dcca9b1a4ce789c6e3497b62a1b9.jpg)
Donald Trump attends a Fox News town hall on October 15, 2024.
Elijah Nouvelage/getty
Donald Trump criticized for declaring himself the ‘father of IVF’: ‘We want insemination’
Talking to Sports news 2018, reports The Daily BeastThe athlete’s daughter told the outlet that Palmer once “made a sound of disgust” when he saw Trump on television.
“Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust — like ‘uck’ or ‘ugg’ — like he couldn’t believe the arrogance and rudeness of this man who was the candidate of a political party he believed in,” she said of her father. , who used to be friends with Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Then he said, ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was,’ and left 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 at charity fundraisers and events at his golf courses and that he “has no patience for people who humiliate other people in public.”
Trump’s latest campaign event — during which he also called Kamala Harris a “s— vice president” — was teased as an event that would review his closing arguments against Harris and “start to get into that frame,” according to senior adviser Jason Miller, according to AP.
Both Harris and Trump continue to campaign ahead of Election Day on November 5.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education