On Tuesday night, Donald Trump flew to Greenville, North Carolina, to campaign for Senate candidate Michael Whatley. He’s currently so down in the polls (13 points!) that his own party’s Senate super PAC stopped buying ads for him earlier this month. But curiously, Trump spent the most memorable part of his speech talking about Senator Jon Husted’s ass.
“I’m studying his body,” he told an oddly delighted rally crowd. “I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it.” Then he got to Husted’s legs. Then “his ass is like, it’s like a pile of muscle.” Husted is a senator from Ohio. Whatley was standing somewhere nearby, probably feigning a smile to obscure the confusion many of us were feeling as we watched this bizarre scene unfold.
But it was less bizarre than it was just two weeks ago, for this was Trump’s third ass-praising moment in eight days, in three states, and by Wednesday morning it had done exactly what it was supposed to do.
Morning Joe cold-opened on the clip. Drudge put ALL THE PRESIDENT’S HOTTIES across the top of the page. CNN’s panel, in the middle of a segment about Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting $4 million ad starring his opponent’s estranged mother, detoured so Paul Begala could note that Husted “has a magnificent rear end, if you notice that, John, my president told me that,” and Kate Bolduan could declare it “open season, boys.”
Yes, I opened my narrative newsletter Morning Frame with it as well, because that covers what the political news media is saying. I’d have clearly led with Arsenal’s likely starting XI if I was in charge of the rundowns today, duh. But, I digress…
There was plenty else for cable news shows to cover. CNN opened both its 6 and 7 a.m. morning shows with its own poll, which has Trump at a record-low 32 percent approval, a record-low 74 with Republicans, and 23 on inflation. Morning Joe got to Steve Witkoff thanking Vladimir Putin for Stephen Hubbard and sycophantly calling the Russian war criminal a “humanitarian,” and to Trump in the Oval Office saying 32,000 dead in Ukraine last month “doesn’t affect us much.” The New York Times bombshell story about a billionaire’s family paying Alina Habba more than $50 million, two weeks before the billionaire got his pardon, didn’t come up in the 6 or 7 a.m. hours of all three networks’ morning shows. The price of gas is still very much whatever the price of gas is in your neighborhood.
Yes, they covered the real news. But also Trump’s sudden ass obsession. It’s unique story of great scarcity! And the ass is what you remember.
The “Trump is creating a distraction” column is a time-honored template, one which I’ve helped hone through years of writing and rewriting, dozens of times over the past decade. But in this instance, that logic is reversed. A “distraction” typically implies a man is trying to hide something. Trump isn’t hiding bad news here. He’s simply more interested in being the subject than in the subject being good, and has been since Roy Cohn taught him that the press clip is the product and the content of the clip is nobody’s business.
It’s simple counterprogramming. Wednesday’s cable news rundowns were almost certainly set to focus on his 32 percent approval rating, Witkoff calling Putin a “humanitarian,” and a $50 million pardon. But Trump generously gifted show producers something better, and by 6 a.m. his “ass celebration” became the cold open. Everyone’s a winner?
Trump doesn’t just watch cable news. He obsesses over it. He knows what a liberal panel will do with his saying “I’ve never studied the body of a man before.” He puts the line in himself, and they take it the rest of the way, every one of them, while being careful to say “weird” and “awkward” rather than the word they’re all circling. Sabrina Rodriguez of the Journal showed wise restraint after looking at the clip on CNN and saying, “I am not going to comment on this clip.” That is the sound of a segment working as Trump intended.
Trump also revealed how he scores his ass obsession. The riff, by his account, moved Husted from ten points down to two points up. That number is abject nonsense as polling, but it’s a perfect expression of what he’s actually measuring, which is how much they talked about it. That’s all he cares about. In fact, that’s all he’s ever cared about. Carnival barker gonna carnival bark.
Do I think Trump is gay? No. Do I think he’s joking here? Yeah. Does either matter? Kind of? But not in the way that people readily think.
Think about who the joke costs. A president who has spent ten years being called a fascist on MS NOW is not going to lose a vote because Willie Geist says, on the air, “maybe the president is telling us something,” and Mika Brzezinski makes the cliché “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” There is no Trump voter for whom “is he gay?” is the question that finally does it.
There are, however, a great many cable hours in which that question crowds out “is he polling at 32 percent?” and “did his lawyer sell a pardon?” or “did his Iran war tank the US economy?!” Trump would much prefer the silly discussion about a man’s ass flood the airwaves than the constant reminder that shit is going tits up for him and his party less than two weeks out from the midterms.
The one network that didn’t take the bait? Fox News! (See, I’m not always targeting this network and can give them praise!) Fox & Friends aired the Greenville rally and cut the riff, keeping “I’m working like a dog” instead. No, it’s not a rebuke, but that audience doesn’t need programming, as they usually get it live. Or at least they used to.
So when you hear the ass joke for the 165th time this week, don’t wonder what Trump’s distracting you from. Instead ask yourself what he’d rather we were talking about. Then notice that you’re talking about what he’s programming instead.
You talking to me?