Trump has turned Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s backside into an actual midterm talking point and now claims the compliment boosted Husted by 12 points. JD Vance says he is jealous and apparently needs to get back to the gym.
Ohio has a competitive Senate race, inflation concerns, national security questions and plenty of issues voters could theoretically discuss. Instead, Donald Trump and JD Vance have spent part of the final midterm stretch talking about Republican Sen. Jon Husted’s a**.
This is not a one-off joke that escaped into the wild. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump and Vance have returned to Husted’s backside repeatedly at events as Election Day approaches, turning one man’s rear end into a surprisingly durable campaign theme.
Trump has called Husted’s backside a pile of muscle and said he examined it. On Wednesday, he posted an Oval Office TikTok declaring that Husted has a great and very powerful a**, which is not a sentence many senators expect to see in an official reelection strategy.
Trump now claims the remarks are actually helping. According to Mediaite, he said his compliment boosted Husted by 12 points, effectively arguing that electoral politics has discovered a new secret weapon and it is glute recognition.
There is no public evidence that a 12-point polling jump was caused by the president discussing Husted’s physique. That is Trump’s claim, not a statistical conclusion, and political scientists have not yet added ‘presidential butt endorsement’ to the standard turnout model.
Vice President JD Vance has decided to join the bit rather than fight it. Asked about Trump’s comments at a Fox News town hall, Vance joked that he was jealous because the president had never complimented him that way and said he needed to get back to the gym.
Vance described Trump as a comedian at heart who likes to get onstage and shake things up. He later referenced the topic again at Texas Christian University, noting that he had received several questions but only one about Jon Husted’s a**.
Husted is running against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in a closely watched Ohio race. Brown’s campaign would presumably prefer to talk about policy differences, but modern politics occasionally decides the central issue is whether the incumbent senator has sufficiently powerful glutes.
Trump’s original comments appear to stem from Husted’s athletic background. The president has praised him as a former football player and used that as evidence that the senator is stronger and more impressive than voters may realize.
That explanation does not really make the repeated focus less strange. There are many ways to say a politician is tough, athletic or disciplined, and most of them do not require an Oval Office video specifically evaluating his rear end.
The funniest part is that the campaign has stopped trying to escape the joke. Vance is participating, Trump is repeating it, Husted is receiving national coverage, and the Wall Street Journal is now documenting the senator’s backside as a legitimate midterm talking point.
Democrats can certainly mock Republicans for turning a Senate race into a gym-locker-room bit. Republicans can respond that Trump has once again gotten people talking about their candidate for free, which is annoyingly difficult to argue with when everyone is, in fact, talking about the candidate.
Whether it wins Husted any votes is another question. But if he wins on Tuesday, Trump will almost certainly claim the a** endorsement was decisive, and political consultants everywhere will have to pretend they are not updating PowerPoint decks accordingly.
