Ohio’s Jon Husted, object of Trump’s leering, is just an empty pair of pants

Jon Husted has a problem: People can’t seem to remember who he is. The former lieutenant governor of Ohio was appointed to be the state’s junior U.S. senator in 2025, after JD Vance became vice president. But Husted hasn’t much of an impression on the Buckeye State’s residents. In an August poll conducted by Emerson College, nearly four in 10 Ohio voters answered “unsure/never heard of” when asked their opinion of the Republican incumbent. Only 14% answered the same regarding his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown. In fact, one in four voters in a Bowling Green State University poll even mistakenly identified Brown, a popular veteran of Ohio politics, as the incumbent. (In fact, Brown lost his seat to Ohio’s other Republican senator, Bernie Moreno, in 2024.)

The Husted campaign has tried to spin his forgettability as an asset, hoping to trick voters into thinking of Brown as a failed incumbent, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Brown is pulling ahead in the most recent polls, riding a larger national turn away from the GOP. So Republicans turned to the one person who knows how to get a headline: Donald Trump.

Bringing the president to campaign in Ohio has certainly helped to boost Husted’s name recognition, but at a painful cost. Now Husted has become the single most famous male victim of Trump’s relentless appetite for sexual harassment. 

The president’s public ogling of Husted started at a Youngstown rally on Oct. 12, when Trump delivered a monologue about how he’d “started examining [Husted’s] body” and had seen big hands and shoulders. Then he said the word “ass.” This caused a reaction of shock and laughter reaction in the crowd and also generated a lot of media attention. So Trump, like a narcissistic rat pushing the “applause” button, turned it into a running joke. At nearly every rally now, whether in Ohio or somewhere else, Trump raves about the 59-year-old Husted’s reputedly spectacular and muscular backside.

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Trump is famously a lifelong heterosexual, so many in the media and on the left are confused. They assume that latent homoerotic yearnings are burbling up, perhaps from the disinhibition that can occur among people who take regular tests for dementia, as does our president. But that’s unlikely, and not just because Husted actually possesses the softer derrière typical of a man his age. If genuine same-sex desire was behind Trump’s leering, the overtly homophobic crowds who populate MAGA rallies would be highly uncomfortable.

Instead, as videos show, they scream with the same laughter they produce when Trump goes on a racist tirade, encourages audience members to commit acts of violence or otherwise showcases his affinity for childish bullying, which remains his main and often sole selling point to his base. It’s a large-scale version of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, where Trump tried to impress the show’s host, Billy Bush, with braggadocious claims that he can grab women’s genitals and they have to put up with it. 

The MAGA crowd may not favor the term “sexual harassment,” but they get that’s what Trump is doing to Husted. He did the same bit with Nicki Minaj, making the rapper-turned-MAGA shill stand up and show off her backside to the crowd at a Michigan rally.  As feminists like to remind folks, sexual harassment is about demonstrating power, not lust. Husted is far from the only man Trump ever catcalls. As the New York Times notes, Trump loves making a spectacle out of men’s looks, for the approval of hooting MAGA audiences who get a vicarious thrill from watching Trump say inappropriate things to fellow Republicans, who have no choice but to grin and pretend they enjoy it. It’s a continuation of the other ways Trump displays his dominance over Republicans with fancy job titles, such as senators and Cabinet officials, by expecting them to flatter him grotesquely on camera or to wear ill-fitting shoes he has “gifted” them. 

None of this should make us feel any sympathy for Husted or other Republicans, who could at any point grow an actual spine and reject Trump’s abuse. These people grovel for their failing leader in the vain hope that some of his celebrity stardust will rub off on them and boost their political ambitions. Husted is a classic example of the problem now facing Republicans. Like most in his party, he has nothing to offer voters, unless they’re hyper-rich capitalists seeking deregulation or massive tax cuts. He has no discernible charisma of his own, either. So all that’s left is leeching onto Trump and hoping his ability to speak to the lizard-brain impulses of bigots will rally enough voters to drag Husted’s empty pair of pants (and his mediocre ass) across the finish line. 

What’s funny about all this is that Husted’s blandness is likely what landed him in the unfortunate spot of getting rhetorically goosed by Trump almost every night. By his own account, Trump knew very little about the Ohio Republican he was there to support at the Youngstown rally, but learned shortly beforehand that Husted played football in college. Trump, whose background is in reality TV, resorted to his tendency to reduce a person to a single defining trait that could fit on a chyron. So even though Husted’s gridiron career ended decades ago, Trump indulged in lame fantasies about how he thinks a football player should look like, complete with broad shoulders and well-defined glutes.

Likely, it would have ended with one iteration if he hadn’t praised Husted’s ass, which elevated a pedestrian effort to define a candidate into the realm of attention-getting weirdness. But of course that remark got everyone’s attention, and Trump will reliably return to any bit, no matter how bizarre, as long as it draws eyeballs. So it was that Husted, who was on the verge of being relegated to “Former College Football Player” in the sprawling reality show cast of Trump’s political orbit, instead became the butt of Trump’s favorite new joke.

It could be worse, of course. Trump has a similar bit he likes to trot out about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for that state’s Senate seat. Except instead of being an imaginary muscleman like Husted, Trump has cast Paxton in the role of ugly loser. In nearly every speech where he mentions Paxton, Trump has to talk about how hideous the guy is and how poorly he supposedly dresses.

With both of these GOP candidates, Trump’s oversimplified, theatrical descriptors don’t have much to do with reality. Whatever he once looked like, Husted doesn’t really have the athletic build Trump fantasizes about. Paxton is nobody’s idea of a handsome man, but it’s simply not true that he dresses poorly. There are many terrible things we could say about Paxton, but his wardrobe appears perfectly fine — especially compared to Trump, who seems to believe that wearing enormously oversized suits will hide his ever-expanding bulk. But these two guys are now characters in Trump’s world, where, as in reality TV shows, individual humans are stripped of all their complexities to be turned into broad, easily consumed caricatures.

Whether he’s inviting the world to stare at these men’s allegedly spectacular rear end or daring them to smile while he calls them ugly, Trump is sending a message: He owns these people. He can define them in reductive, humiliating language, and they have been so hollowed out as human beings that they won’t even defend themselves. Normally, when a leader is both a lame duck and cratering in his approval polls, the way Donald Trump is now, that person’s party will start looking for ways to move on and forge a new identity. It’s a sign of how empty the Republican Party is that they seem incapable of doing that. They don’t just submit to Trump’s continued abuse, but even keep seeking it out. That must be a miserable experience, but clearly they feel that without him, they’re nothing at all. It’s tough to disagree.