Podcaster Tommy Vietor can’t make sense of how Donald Trump dominates the Evangelical vote despite his notorious potty mouth, which included him praising the late golfing legend Arnold Palmer’s “unbelievable” manhood on Saturday.
The Pod Save America host said on his show Tuesday that it’s “head-spinning” that Trump can publicly rave about a dead man’s endowment yet still overwhelmingly win over Christians.
“The head-spinning part about this is always that [Trump] wins evangelical voters, like 95 to one,” he said. “And you would think that the kind of Mike Pences of the world, the people who would find this offensive in some way, or, you know, the people get mad about a Disney character not being white every few years, just let it go—kind of brush this stuff off.”
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If you missed it over the weekend, Trump offered his all-around praise—in the literal sense—of Palmer, who died in 2016, while speaking at a rally in the golfer’s hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
“This is a guy that was all man,” Trump said. “He took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it.”
Trump continued, “We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold, they’d say: ‘Man…’”
The comments elicited mockery of all kinds. It was central to a bit on Monday’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, led Palmer’s daughters to condemn the comments as “disrespectful,” and made it into the title of Pod Save America’s episode, “Trump Closes With Small Fries and Big D---s.”
Despite the comments’ fallout, many have pondered—will the utter bizarreness of the remarks, even so close to Election Day, actually have an impact on Trump’s standing with Evangelicals at the ballot box?
History suggests it won’t. Trump’s record of countless crude remarks—about women, his opponents, and essentially anyone who doesn’t cozy up to him—didn’t stop the vast majority of white Americans who attend worship services regularly from voting for him in 2020, the Pew Research Center found.
If anything, Pod Save America’s co-host Jon Favreau theorized on Tuesday’s show that the Palmer comments may actually help Trump among young voters.
“Look, there’s a little bit of politics in him talking about Arnold Palmer having a big d--k, which is, like, [to show] he was a real man,” Favreau said. “There used to be real men in this country. We celebrate real masculine men when the other side doesn’t... Big swinging d---s, big golfing d---s. He doesn’t even need clubs, this Arnold Palmer guy. He’s just out there with a putter.”
