President Donald Trump, 80, told a rally crowd in Bullhead City, Ariz., on Wednesday, Oct. 14, that First Lady Melania Trump had asked him to drop his onstage impression of a transgender weightlifter — and then performed it anyway, grunts included.
The president ran through the things his wife wishes he would stop doing onstage. “My wife is going crazy with me,” he told supporters, quoting her reviews of his act: “You’re president of the United States, you shouldn’t be doing this.”
A Wave Instead of “YMCA”
Her second request, according to her husband, concerned his walk-off dance to the Village People’s “YMCA.” His wife asked him to skip the dancing and leave with a gentle wave, he said, and he mimicked the request onstage with a flutter of the hand and a breezy “Goodbye, everyone.” He quoted her again: “You should not dance off the stage, my darling. I love you very much, but please, don’t do that.”
Trump called the song the “gay national anthem” and said it helped him win the highest gay vote of any Republican in history. He then ended the Arizona rally by dancing off the stage.
Village People frontman Victor Willis, who co-wrote “YMCA,” died in June 2026. Willis had threatened in 2024 to sue anyone who described the track as a gay anthem, and his band performed at Trump’s inauguration festivities in January 2025.
The president also worked in a story about a swimmer supposedly suffering from windburn. Footage of the riff circulated on X, where one viewer asked: “What the hell is he talking about? How does talking about that help anyone?”
The Barbell Bit in Wasilla
Trump had aired the material a day earlier, on Tuesday, Oct. 13, in Wasilla, Alaska, while campaigning for Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. His wife hates when he talks about this, he said, and calls it “so unelegant, darling.” He told the crowd he had answered her by pointing out that he had just won the election in a landslide and asking to be left alone.
He launched into the barbell bit there too, pausing in mock hesitation to ask whether he should finish. “Oh, my wife hates this … she said it’s so damn unpresidential,” he said. The audience cheered, he thanked them, and he finished the bit.
A second marriage-themed story followed at the same rally. Trump described a police officer whose retirement savings had recovered so well that, the officer told him, his wife “now views me as a financial genius.” When the officer said he was “thinking about” staying married, Trump advised him to stay because it was “much less expensive.”
He closed the Alaska stretch by calling transgender athletes in women’s sports “so demeaning” to women. Wasilla sits about 45 miles north of Anchorage, is the hometown of former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and serves as headquarters of the Iditarod sled dog race.
Trump called Sullivan “one of the best senators that you have” and joked that it had been “a lot of flying.”
Absent From Every Midterm Rally
Melania Trump, whose signature issue is anti-bullying, has not appeared at any of her husband’s midterm rallies as Republicans work to protect their grip on Congress before Election Day, Nov. 3. The weightlifter impression has been in the act since at least May 2025, and the president has been saying for months that his wife dislikes it. At an Oct. 7 rally in San Antonio, he offered another domestic detail: she corrected his pronunciation of “vegan” by addressing him as “Sir.”
A Substack Claim the White House Rejects
Author Michael Wolff wrote in a July post on his Substack, HOWL, that the marriage was at its lowest point since the Stormy Daniels trial and that the couple barely spoke. The White House rejects that account, and spokesman Steven Cheung accused Wolff of fabricating stories and challenged his credibility. Wolff earlier alleged in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” that the Trumps kept separate bedrooms.
Melania Trump, appearing on “Fox & Friends” on Sept. 23, said she had praised the delivery of her husband’s U.N. General Assembly speech. “Sometimes he doesn’t want to hear it, what I tell him, but that’s okay,” she said.
