Kathrine Frich
That strange riff was not a one-off slip.
Campaign rallies right before a major vote usually stick to the economy, taxes, and getting people to the polls.
Yet when a speaker drops the script for a riff off the cuff, the topic can swerve somewhere nobody in the room saw coming.
On Sunday night, voters in the Midwest heard a family anecdote that left plenty of jaws on the floor.
A bizarre detour
During a midterm rally in Salina, Kansas, US President Donald Trump told the crowd he had zero interest in ever dating his “beautiful” sisters, according to HuffPost.
To set up the joke, he even described a moment from the past when people supposedly asked him about it directly.
“People years ago, they asked me, ‘Is it true that you’re dating your sister?’” Trump said to laughs in the arena.
“I said no. … I have two beautiful sisters. One of them passed away, fantastic person, federal judge, top, top federal judge, and the other was a beautiful sister. But I’ve never had an interest in dating her, marrying her. … Never even crossed my mind.”
Today, 84-year-old Elizabeth Trump Grau is his only surviving sibling, HuffPost noted. His older sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, passed away in 2023 at the age of 86.
Behind the punchline
That strange riff was not a one-off slip. Just days earlier, the president floated a similar joke about incest and his sisters while speaking at a campaign stop in Daytona Beach, Florida, according to HuffPost.
In Kansas, he used the family story as a springboard to repeat his unverified claim that Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar once married her own brother.
As HuffPost reported, federal agents recently raided Omar’s home while the Justice Department looks into her citizenship.
The sibling remarks capped off a wild two-state tour through Iowa and Kansas ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. Along the way, Trump boasted that he could have won the Vietnam War in a single week and trashed the National Football League over what he called its “shit” kickoff rule, HuffPost reported.
