On Sunday, US President Donald Trump took a break from complimenting the buttocks of Republican senator Jon Husted to admire someone else’s.
“I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before – Nicki Minaj,” he said of the well-endowed rapper, who attended the president’s rally in Michigan. “That’s hard to miss.”
As polling day nears, the US president’s daily rally speeches have become looser and less inhibited. For the most part, this has manifested in funny, harmless ways, such as his routine about examining men’s bodies.
Some observers have interpreted this as an indication that Trump, 80, is mentally ailing and failing to conceal a latent bisexuality. A better explanation is simply that, as with previous campaigns, he has stumbled upon a bit that gets laughs.
While complaining about his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which is awarded by a Norwegian committee, the president bemoaned that Norway “sucks” and has “become a shit-house country, actually”.
Over the weekend, Trump boasted to a crowd in Georgia that the US oil and gas industry was making billions of dollars – trillions, even – while Americans paid higher prices for petrol due to the war with Iran.
“I can just see the fake headlines: President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump,” he mused. “I said, ‘I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it.’ We’re making a freakin’ fortune.”
Trump’s increasing crudity, profanity and radical candour can probably be dismissed as symptoms of daily, two-hour speeches that have started to bore even the man himself. A more sinister matter is the spiralling racism.
The president has labelled Democratic candidate for the US Senate Abdul El-Sayed a “vicious, violent jihadist”. He also delights in calling the Muslim man “Mohamed”, and has incorporated a joke into his rallies where he suggests that if you call someone from the Middle East “Mohamed”, you’ll be correct most of the time.
Speaking in Michigan on Sunday, Trump’s rhetoric turned even more overtly prejudiced. “He would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate,” the president said of El-Sayed. “I want him to have a metal detector!”
Trump also invoked the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks perpetrated against America by Islamic jihadists and said the people of Michigan must vote to stop a jihadist walking into the US Senate.
He welcomed to the stage David Beamer, the father of 9/11 hero Todd Beamer, who was among the passengers on Flight 93 who fought back against the hijackers and prevented the plane from being flown towards Washington.
Beamer questioned whether El-Sayed, who was born in Rochester Hills, Michigan, was really American in the full sense of the word.
“Abdul has a birth certificate. A birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. You know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you American,” Beamer said to applause. “He’s not an American, he’s anti-American … He has blood that’s red; however, he has chosen to remove any strain of white and blue.”
Although El-Sayed was probably always going to be tarred in this way, he has brought some of it on himself. He has been reluctant to engage with questions about alleged links between members of his Egyptian family and the Muslim Brotherhood, a designated terrorist organisation in Egypt and the United States.
He was slow to disavow such groups, arguing he shouldn’t have to, and to distance himself from remarks by his friend Hasan Piker – a rabble-rousing Marxist podcaster who says the US deserved 9/11 and professes to hate America.
El-Sayed believes he is only facing these questions because he is Muslim, and calls it out. Trump has seized on this, labelling it arrogance. “He’s a nasty guy … he’s worse than I am,” Trump said at Sunday’s rally.
Recently, El-Sayed launched a campaign ad featuring testimony from Tucker Carlson, among other right-wing pundits. Carlson is best known now for his sharp turn against Israel, and the ad will do nothing to tamp down accusations of antisemitism levelled against El-Sayed.
Adrian Hemond, chief executive of bipartisan, Michigan-based public relations consultancy Grassroots Midwest, says when it comes to inflammatory rhetoric in the Michigan Senate race, you can “take your pick”.
“El-Sayed has made antisemitic podcasters a key issue in the campaign,” he says. “Republicans are turning over every rock looking for people who don’t like Arabs or Islam. A shit-house rat smells better than this campaign.”
Speaking at a rally with El-Sayed later on Sunday, Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont, condemned Trump’s Islamophobia and said the attacks were a substitute for policy.
“Trump may be a mentally unbalanced person, but he is not stupid,” Sanders said. “Like demagogues throughout history, he understands that the best and most effective way to stay in power is to divide people up. Nothing new about it.”
Nick Bryant, an author and former US correspondent who covered Trump’s first administration, points out the president has a history of dialling up his “racist demagoguery” when in political strife, or as polling day nears.
It was towards the end of then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ honeymoon period in the 2024 campaign that Trump sensationally claimed illegal immigrants in Ohio were eating the cats and dogs of a town’s residents.
Michigan was treated to a small antidote over the weekend, when former president Barack Obama rallied for El-Sayed in Detroit.
Obama conceded he had his differences with the Senate candidate, but in a classically Obama-esque way. “You know who else doesn’t agree with everything I do? Michelle Obama,” he said to laughs.
The line that received the most attention came when Obama mocked Trump’s gaudy White House renovations.
“What’s up with the gold?” the former president said.
“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Conservatives condemned Obama for punching down on a restaurant chain synonymous with middle America. But it helped reaffirm the Democrat as arguably the finest political orator of the era.
And it was a reminder that, unlike many of Trump’s recent attempts, one can be funny without being obscene.
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.