Arnold Palmer’s daughter reacts to Donald Trump’s references to her father

One of the late golf legends Arnold Palmer Daughters calls Donald Trump’s References to her father’s genitals were “a poor choice” to honor his memory, adding that she was not upset by the comments.

“There’s not much to say. I’m not really upset,” Peg Palmer Wears, 68, said in an interview with The Associated Press on Sunday. “I think it was a bad choice to remember my father, but what are you going to do?”

Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania – the town where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to play golf from his father – Trump started his rally in the final weeks of the campaign with an in-depth, 12-minute story about Palmer that included an anecdote about what Palmer looked like in the shower.

“When he was showering with other professionals, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God.’ That’s unbelievable,” Trump said, laughing. “I had to say that. We have women here who are very cultured, but they used to think of Arnold as a man.”

Wears said that she had only fleeting encounters with Trump at events decades ago, but that her father and the Republican presidential candidate, an avid golfer who owns golf courses around the world, shared a kinship primarily because they had “an interest in Golf and a love for golf.”

At times she felt emotional as she remembered conversations with her father, who died in 2016 at the age of 87Wears said her father “believed in the Republican Party.”

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what my dad would say about something or what would happen,” Wears said. “We didn’t always agree, but he was a true American who believed deeply in this country even as he questioned its direction.”

When asked three times on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday what he thought of Trump’s comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., declined 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 understand 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 an obscenity to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris, but that the former president’s comments had no impact voters one way or another.

“I mean, it’s just natural. He speaks in exaggeration. He gets his audience excited,” Sununu said.

But Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who supports Harris, argued the comments showed how little Trump is focused on important issues, which will turn off voters.

“I think there are a lot of Americans, whether conservative, progressive or moderate, who are saying, ‘Really?'” Sanders said on CNN. “We are facing major problems in this country. Is this the type of person we want as President of the United States?

Wears, who declined to say who she would vote for in the Nov. 5 election, said she would cast her vote in North Carolina, a key state, and described herself as an “independent” voter.

“The people of western Pennsylvania are very smart people, they work very hard and they will make their own decisions, just like I will make my own decision, using all of my history and consciousness,” Wears said of the upcoming election . “And I hope that people will vote with it.”

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Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP. Associated Press writer Amand Seitz in Washington contributed to this report.