Jake Tapper couldn’t get a straight answer from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) when he asked him Donald Trump’s recent rally riff about golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis on Sunday’s episode of “State of the Union.”
During a rally in Palmer’s Pennsylvania hometown on Saturday, the former president went on a 10-minute ramble which ended with him praising the PGA legend’s intimate anatomy.
The CNN host reminded Johnson that election day is rapidly approaching and asked if voters really wanted to hear about Palmer’s private parts as the Republican’s closing message.
Johnson skirted Tapper’s question, telling him the real issue is if voters are “better off now” than back when Trump was in office.
“Look at the record of these two candidates,” he said. “This shouldn’t be about personalities. It should be about policy.”
Though the speaker tried to deflect, Tapper pressed on.
“I’m sure that you think that a policy debate would be better than a personality debate, but if President Biden had gone onstage and spoke about the size of a pro golfer’s penis, I think you would be on this show right now saying you were shocked and appalled, and you would suggest it was evidence of his cognitive decline,” he told Johnson.
“I know you want to talk about policy, and I respect that,” Tapper continued, pivoting back to concerns about Trump’s “fitness, his acuity and his stability.”
Again, he asked Johnson, “Why is he talking about Arnold Palmer’s penis in front of Pennsylvania voters?”
After a bit of back and forth, Johnson reluctantly relented.
“I’ll address it. Let me answer it. OK. Don’t say it again,” the clearly uncomfortable speaker told Tapper, before dismissing the Palmer penis comments as mere “lines in a rally.”
“You can cherry pick a few words or lines out of a two-hour event,” he later added, then criticizing Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ communication style as “word salads.”
“We all know that the facts, the American people see it and, you know, the media can pick it apart, but people are going to vote,” the Louisiana legislator went on. “They’re going to vote what’s best for their family. And they see that in Trump.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Johnson tried to downplay Trump’s recent comments about considering deploying the military against a Democratic “enemy within.”
Painting Trump as the victim, he called the former president “the most attacked, maligned political figure in U.S. history” and said he was only suggesting the National Guard be used to keep “peace in our streets.”
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“Look, Trump is talking about restoring law and order,” the speaker said, going on to characterize the Republican’s comments as social media banter and “fun language.”
Watch Johnson and Tapper’s exchange above. The conversation about the Palmer comments begins around the three-minute mark.