Arnold Palmer’s daughter says Donald Trump disrespected her late father’s memory by fawning over the size of the champion golfer’s penis at a campaign rally over the weekend.
“Hackneyed anecdotes from the locker room … seemed disrespectful and inappropriate to me,” Peg Palmer Wears told ABC News on Monday, two days after the former president publicly suggested her father was well endowed.
Wears added that “people coming to these rallies” hosted by Trump as he seeks a second presidency “deserve substance about plans [he] has as a candidate”. She specifically called on him to address “some of the threats he’s made to people”, an apparent reference to how he recently suggested sending the US military against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls during the 5 November presidential election.
“These are important issues that should be discussed for people when they’re getting ready to vote, and using my dad to cover over the important things just seems unacceptable to me,” Wears said.
Trump was speaking to his supporters in Palmer’s home town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday at a regional airport named after him when the former president suddenly invoked the genitals of the renowned golfer, an old acquaintance.
“This is a guy that was all man,” Trump remarked while talking about Palmer. “This man was strong and tough, and … when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there – they said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’”
It was not the first time Trump had spoken of Palmer in that fashion. As Mediaite noted, some editions of the Trump book Confidence Man by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman recount how the former president was in the Oval Office preparing to host a rally in Latrobe in 2020 and bragged to guests about having seen Palmer disrobe at the local country club there.
Trump made it a point to mention “the size of [Palmer’s] genitalia” that day, the book’s introduction said.
During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, one of Trump’s most prominent allies, the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, repeatedly refused to defend the Republican presidential nominee’s most recent comments about Palmer.
But, appearing on the same news program, a vocal supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said Trump’s remarks Saturday in Latrobe demonstrated how unfocused he was on topics that mattered.
“Is this the kind of human being we want as president of the United States?” asked Bernie Sanders, the independent US senator.
Wears used her conversation with ABC on Monday to join those expressing their disapproval, explaining how she was unimpressed with the way Trump had appropriated “someone he admires to bolster his own image”.
Palmer – whose name also graces an iced tea and lemonade beverage – collected more than 60 pro golf tournament victories, including seven major titles. He died at age 87 in 2016, a little more than a month before Trump won the presidency.
Wears told ABC she is an unaffiliated voter in North Carolina, which is one of several swing states that are being closely contested and are expected to decide the race between Trump and Harris. She said to the network that she plans to vote in November’s election but declined to disclose for whom she would cast her ballot.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
