On this day in 2018, the investor and philanthropist George Soros became the first of 16 prominent progressives and media organizations to receive a pipe bomb in the mail. Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc was ultimately arrested, tried, and jailed. Happy Thursday! Swin here. This morning we’re talking “ass,” and lots of it. I don’t mean to sound crass, though.

I’m merely directly quoting the president of the United States, who won’t stop talking about one Ohio politician’s sweet, manly, and above all muscle-bound behind. In today’s ’First Draft,’ we’ll get right into why Donald Trump keeps obsessing about Senator Jon Husted’s bottom, even when he’s not physically campaigning in Husted’s state – and yes, our reporting shows there’s a deeper reason for this that you may not have considered.

Plus, a new ad from Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., points to a sad truth for deputy chief of staff and White House policy vampire Stephen Miller: Voters prefer not to see him. There’s worrying Iran war news too. In we go. Donald Trump gestures towards Senator Jon Husted at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images. “They love it!” President Donald Trump has privately said, according to a person familiar with the matter. This source, along with two other Republicans close to the president, talked to me about how much Trump, during these critical final weeks of the 2026 U.S.

midterm elections, has marveled to advisers and close allies about how much his rally audiences have been eating up his recurring monologues praising Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted’s “ass.” Trump, who lives and breathes by the validation he gets from his cult-driven rally-goers, pays close attention to what draws the biggest applause and the loudest laughs and boos. In recent days, he’s road-tested his “ass” fixation at multiple venues. Trump is now so all-in on Husted’s allegedly wonderful, tight “ass” that he’s using it in speeches even when he’s not in Ohio, as was the case in North Carolina this week.

(I’m an Ohio resident and voter, and Husted’s buttcheeks don’t have any material or political impact on my or my family’s life – that must be exponentially truer to any voter in North Carolina, or in any state that isn’t the Buckeye one.) “I did a rally in a place called Dayton,” Trump said first, in Youngstown, Ohio, earlier this month. “I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked, and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass, and I looked at the whole... And then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands.

He’s got these like claws.” Then, in northern Kentucky – near Ohio, at least, if not in it – Trump said: “He came up, and he was talking very nicely, and I stood right over here, and I examined his ass. I never did that with a man before. I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders, I looked at his feet, I looked at his hand, I looked at his jawline, studying.” And on Tuesday in North Carolina, the president said: “So he’s over here, I’m over here. And I’m studying his body. I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it of course… But I looked at his ass. And then I looked at his legs.

And I said, ‘His ass is, it’s like a pile of muscle.” So why is he doing this?

What do the sources say?