The daughter of late golfing legend Arnold Palmer believes that questions of size—whether of crowds or genitalia—preoccupy Donald Trump, an observation spurred by the former president’s vulgar remarks about her father at a Pennsylvania rally over the weekend.
Speaking to a crowd in Latrobe, Trump embarked on a 12-minute monologue about Palmer, who grew up in the town. His comments crescendoed in several obscene remarks about the size of the golfer’s penis, recalling, “When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’”
Chuckling, the former president continued, “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”
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Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears, told newsmagazine Inside Edition in an interview set to air on Monday evening that her father would not have appreciated Trump’s X-rated rhetoric.
“To talk about the showers and my father’s anatomy… I think Trump seems to be obsessed with these things, just like crowd size,” she told the program. “Size seems to matter to him in what I’ve seen.”
Wears added, “I don’t know what goes through his head… I find most of his discourse pretty inane.”
The 68-year-old earlier opened up to the Associated Press about her immediate reaction to the rally, saying in an interview published Sunday that she was “not really upset” by it. “I think it was a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father, but what are you going to do?”
Wears said that her father, who died in 2016 at 87 years old, “believed in the Republican Party.
“A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about what my father would say about something or what’s happening,” she told the wire. “We didn’t always agree on things, but he was a quintessential American who believed fervently in this country, even when he questioned its direction.”
In 2018, Wears told The Sporting News that her father had been “appalled” by Trump’s behavior during his 2016 presidential campaign.
“He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character,” she said.
To The Independent on Sunday, she added that Trump’s appropriation of her father “in this context… seems inappropriate,” and that there were other things about Palmer that “would be better to focus on.”
Wears declined to share with the AP whom she plans to vote for in the election next month, describing herself as an “unaffiliated” voter who will cast her ballot in North Carolina, a key battleground state. Trump won there in 2020.
