I Looked at Hundreds of Photos of Jon Husted. I’m Not Sure I Agree With Trump’s Opinion of His Ass.

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At a campaign rally in North Carolina on Tuesday night—ostensibly in support of the state’s many imperiled Republicans as the midterms draw nearer—Donald Trump spent a portion of his stump speech complimenting the backside of Ohio Sen. Jon Husted. The president said Husted’s “ass” was like a “pile of muscle”; that he had “examined” the man’s physical makeup up and down; that he has “big feet”—if you know what I’m saying—and that his shoulders were sculpted like a “piece of steel.”

These remarks took nobody by surprise. Among his many hyperfixations, Trump possesses a special fondness for big, strong, beautiful men, particularly when they are in close proximity to him. I watched the president become enchanted with Zohran Mamdani’s beaming smile, as well as the razor-sharp cheekbones of New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart. In fact, during another recent speech, Trump spent a few moments bragging about how he was flanked by a fleet of gallant, handsome soldiers—rather than, you’re left to assume, emaciated, low-testosterone liberals. Unsurprisingly, this has led a number of people to claim—or at least meme about—him being closeted. (As Helen Lewis writes in the Atlantic, some folks have diagnosed him with the faux-condition “gay dementia.”)

There are, perhaps, better topics for an incumbent president with a pitifully low approval rating to be focusing on during the homestretch of an election than the shapeliness of a candidate’s butt—especially when said candidate is in a dogfight with Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown. But Trump has never been an especially disciplined political communicator, and he seriously can’t stop talking about Jon Husted’s ass. A week before this most recent volley, Trump heralded the supposedly caked-up senator with the exact same diction. (“I don’t do this with men very often. … I looked at his ass, and I looked at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws,” said the president.) MAGA electoral strategy has long operated under the dogma that you’ve got to let Trump be Trump no matter what ridiculous tangent he finds himself on, and in that sense, this is business as usual. One day he’s talking about some guy’s butt; the next he’s talking about Hannibal Lecter. But as a passive observer, I’m left with only one question about this late entry into the Trump canon: Does Jon Husted really have a nice ass? And if so, how nice are we talking?

The answer to that query proved to be surprisingly difficult to pin down. After Googling “Jon Husted,” “Jon Husted body,” and “Jon Husted ass,” I found that there are few images documenting the man’s allegedly virile silhouette. Husted’s Instagram, too, contains precisely zero ass shots or, barring that, thirst traps. Like most senators, he is photographed almost exclusively from the front, clad in typical Republican garb—navy blazers and slacks, the occasional checkered flannel to demonstrate a semblance of backwoods fluency—shielding off any lascivious thoughts. The best I could find is a picture of him at the Wayne County Fair, standing in front of a counter, his body turned toward the camera while he, I don’t know, orders a bushel of deep-fried ferrets, or whatever it is that people in northeast Ohio eat. An untucked black button-down drapes below his belt. From what I can tell, he appears to have a totally normal ass.

Further investigation supports this observation. A video uploaded to Husted’s YouTube channel last month features him shooting clay pigeons with a couple of constituents. Here again, there is not much cake to speak of. Husted certainly isn’t one of those pancake-butt white guys—he has hips, a waist, and real body mass—but in the only sequence in the video when his back is to the camera, his posterior isn’t much to write home about. To that point, I would posit that Trump has a much larger ass than Husted, though you could say that about pretty much anyone. For what it’s worth, Husted also played cornerback while attending the University of Dayton in the 1980s, but as far as I can tell, no videos from his playing days have made it to the internet. That’s a shame, because those primary sources would have been indelible for this investigation.

There are some necessary caveats to mention here. Unsurprisingly, I could not find any photos of Husted with his shirt off or wearing RFK Jr.–style skinny jeans. No, he dresses like a bog-standard conservative dad, and conservative dads generally attempt to obscure their bodies as much as possible. (There is an image of Husted holding court on a factory floor, wearing an uncharacteristic blue checkered shirt tucked into straight-leg khakis. His ass does look pretty sharp there.) Similarly, Trump never said that Husted had a “big ass,” or even a “great ass.” His assertion was just that it is simply muscular and impressive, which is something much easier to clock in person, possibly through tactile means, which I shudder to imagine. Last but not least, it ought to be mentioned that Jon Husted is one of the more anonymous senators in America—some guy propelled to J.D. Vance’s vacant seat after Trump got reelected, who boasts an utterly ordinary suite of establishment policy objectives. Naturally, when I texted a few friends who cover Capitol Hill to ask whether they had met Jon Husted—and if he does, in fact, have a noteworthy ass—their response, uniformly, was, “Who is Jon Husted?”

“They’re all the same guy to me,” responded one reporter.

“I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup,” said another.

And so, the only conclusion anyone can draw is that this is just what things are like at the terminal end of the Trump years. The president is uninterested in just about everything that pertains to the job. But he will never let pass the opportunity to say something somnolently horny about a member of the Republican coalition. You get the sense that Trump takes real pleasure in forcing these politicians to stand there, holding a rictus grin, waiting for him to finish speaking about the tautness of their glutes so they can get back to the latest round of tax cuts. The MAGA movement has proved that it’s possible to achieve real power with this formula, so long as you’re OK with being sexually humiliated by an 80-year-old man. Of course, they’ve happily made that trade-off for ages.