By MEG KINNARD
One of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughters calls Donald Trump’s references to her father’s genitalia “a poor choice of approaches” to honoring his memory, adding that she wasn’t upset by the remarks.
“There’s nothing much to say. I’m not really upset,” Peg Palmer Wears, 68, told The Associated Press in an interview on Sunday. “I think it was a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father, but what are you going to do?”
On Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania — the city where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father — Trump kicked off his rally in the campaign’s closing weeks with a detailed, 12-minute story about Palmer that included an anecdote about what Palmer looked like in the showers.
“When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”
Wears said that she had only had passing encounters with Trump at functions decades ago but that her father and the GOP presidential nominee, an avid golfer who owns courses around the world, primarily shared a kinship over “an interest in golf and a love of golf.”
Emotional at times as she recalled conversations with her father, who died in 2016 at 87, Wears said her father “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,” Wears said. “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.”
Asked three times Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” about what he thought of Trump’s remarks, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., refused to answer.
“I’ll address it, let me answer it,” Johnson said, without ever answering the question. “Don’t say it again. We don’t have to say it. I get it.”
Gov. Chris Sununu, R-N.H., told ABC’s “This Week” that he didn’t like Trump’s comments, including one in which he used a profanity to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris, but that the former president’s remarks would not sway voters one way or the other.
“I mean it’s just par for the course. He speaks in hyperbole. He gets his crowds riled up,” Sununu said.
But Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who backs Harris, argued the comments show how little Trump is focusing on important issues, which will turn off voters.
“I think you have a lot of Americans, whether you are conservative, whether you’re progressive or moderate, who say, ‘Really?’” Sanders said on CNN. “We have major issues facing this country. Is this the kind of human being that we want as president of the United States?
Wears, who declined to say for whom she would vote in the Nov. 5 election, said she would be casting her ballot in North Carolina, a pivotal state, and described herself as an “unaffiliated” voter.
“The people of western Pennsylvania are very smart people, and they’re very hard working, and they’ll make their own decisions, as I will make my own decision, using all the history and awareness I have,” Wears said of the upcoming election. “And that’s what I hope people go vote with.”
Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP. Associated Press writer Amanda Seitz in Washington contributed to this report.
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