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The 2024 presidential election is ending exactly where it did in 2016: the locker room.
Or to put a finer point on it: in the showers at the clubhouse.
Donald Trump himself in 2016 was on defense after the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, an incident that led to angry rebukes from his own party and could have doomed his campaign. The explanation at the time that it was simply “locker room talk” was widely panned.
But now, he’s delivering a closing argument that expressly embraces locker room talk — the vulgarity and the chortling alike — and is inviting his voters to laugh along.
When Trump shared an off-color story about the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis — “all man,” Trump marveled at a rally over the weekend — he lurched the reins of the race and headed, for him and the broader GOP, down a well-trodden path.
Trump is closing this campaign, by intention or instinct or perhaps both, with a message of masculinity specifically geared toward those who are turned off by changing sexual mores and the political correctness around them.
The entire episode shows how the crassness of the 2024 campaign has become not just normalized but cheered by his supporters.
And in a party where a broader crisis of male malaise has long captured the attention of both its intelligentsia and its grassroots, Trump is seeping deeper into its courting of the Barstool set. Trump’s latest comments may have been vulgar. But they rhyme with the current conservative zeitgeist.
Just look at the difference in reaction between now and 2016. Eight years ago, voters and Republican officeholders went through a moment of genuine consternation in responding to his comments about grabbing women by their genitals. Then, almost a third of the Republican caucus in the Senate said they wouldn’t back him.
He faces no such uproar now.
And that isn’t only because everyone is now more accustomed to Trump than they were then. It’s because one of the main subtexts of this campaign is now fully bursting into the open — whether it’s the Trump campaign and Republicans up and down the ballot with their anti-transgender ads (“Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you,” his campaign proclaimed in the first transgender-related ad by a presidential campaign) or calling Harris’ running mate Tim Walz “Tampon Tim” — from a bill the Minnesota governor signed requiring public schools to provide students access to menstrual products — instead of “Coach Walz.” Even former President Barack Obama questioned the size of Trump’s genitalia during a prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
And this time unlike in 2016, Trump’s top surrogates aren’t left reeling so much as squirming. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would only say on CNN on Sunday that Trump “has fun at the rallies; he says things that are off-the-cuff.”
“At this point, it’s not exactly news that Donald Trump is a different kind of candidate and a different kind of cat, and he says and does things that other traditional candidates, more buttoned-up candidates, don’t,” said Ralph Reed, the Faith and Freedom Coalition chair and longtime Trump ally who stood by him through the Access Hollywood crisis, in an interview with POLITICO. “That doesn’t mean that voters of faith always agree with what he says off the cuff or an occasional profanity, but I think at this point it’s baked in the cake.”
Reed added: “He’s a real performer. He’s very entertaining. And I think trying to change his personality at this late date is probably an exercise in futility.”
Trump’s comments about Palmer were hardly out of character for him. Down the homestretch, his campaign has more illicit sex and golf references than a John Updike title. Not long before he was verbally ogling Palmer’s sex organ, he was criticizing Harris surrogate and the billionaire Mark Cuban for his “Really low clubhead speed.”
And taken on their own, the likelihood that any one thing Trump says might work against him is an idea most Democrats have given up on by now — or, as one adviser to major Democratic Party donors, granted anonymity to speak freely, put it, echoing Trump’s own famous refrain: “The man could shoot someone on 5th Ave. and no one would care.”
But taken together — the Palmer discourse, the bizarre onstage dance party, the meandering speeches that have worried even his allies — it’s possible some voters are considering Trump’s state of mind.
“Donald Trump is the 78-year old who’s flailing around on stage doing crazy stuff like talking about Arnold Palmer in the shower,” said Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean.
Maslin added that if Harris wins, part of it will be “because people don’t want to go back to all the insanity of Donald Trump.”
Harris herself is calling Trump “unhinged” and connected his perplexing dance performance amid people fainting in the crowd to his own health and physical fortitude. “Hope he’s okay,” she casually posted to X.
Or it could go the other way — as Trump courts the male voters he needs to overcome his deficit with women.
“I think what they’re leaning into is this overly masculine message of saying these crass things, being a shock jock, saying these vulgar things that are essentially locker room talk,” said Danielle Cendejas, a Democratic strategist whose firm did campaign mail for both of Obama’s presidential campaigns.
Indeed, that’s how some voters metabolized Trump’s ribald anecdote.
Patti Moon, a 54-year-old from New Bern, said at a Trump rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Monday that Trump’s comments at his Pennsylvania rally didn’t change her view of the former president. She said she likes that Trump “talks just like us.”
Jason Mayou, a freshman at East Carolina University, said the former president’s comments about Palmer were “kind of crazy” but did not change his opinion of Trump.
“I feel like you just have to have a little sense of humor,” said Mayou. “And then get over it, it is what it is. He made a funny comment.”
In the Philadelphia suburbs, meanwhile, joined by former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney at a campaign event aimed at wooing Republicans, Harris warned voters Monday to not be distracted by Trump’s humor.
“There are things that he says that will be the subject of skits and laughter and jokes, but words have meaning coming from someone who aspires to stand behind the seal of the president of the United States,” Harris said. “These are the things that are at stake.”
But back at Trump’s Greenville rally, Wendy Coyne, of nearby Nashville and a longtime Trump supporter, compared Trump’s Palmer remarks to something her partner might say.
Something, she said, at which she would surely laugh.
His remarks, Coyne said, were just “locker-room talk.”
