Why Is Donald Trump Suddenly Obsessed With Men's Bodies, Especially Their Butts?
I talked with John Stagliano, the adult filmmaker known as Buttman, about the president's newest fixation.
The one thing you can say about President Donald Trump's truly bizarre press event yesterday in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where he went on and on about algae and the failures of the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations to successfully rehab the thing?
It pales in comparison to his growing fixation on men's bodies—and specifically on the ass ("a pile of muscle") of Sen. Jon Husted (R–Ohio)—that developed over the past couple of weeks on the campaign trail. As USA Today reported, "President Trump keeps talking about Sen. Jon Husted's backside." It compiled a supercut of presidential remarks specifically about the embattled Republican, who was appointed to fill the Senate seat left vacant by J.D. Vance's ascension to the vice presidency and is polling slightly behind in today's election. In North Carolina on October 20, Trump declared, "I'm studying his [Husted's] 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."
An October 22 episode of The Fifth Column podcast cheekily summarized various Trump statements under the headline "Donald Trump Is Gay." The episode featured a supercut of Trump admiring in detail the physiques of various politicians and members of the military that seems more like an outtake from 1967's Reflections in a Golden Eye than a normal stump speech.
In the wake of this odd series of remarks by the president, I reached out to John Stagliano, the adult filmmaker who is widely known as Buttman (warning: link is to explicit content), after a character he debuted first in a 1989 movie. Who better to provide insight into the allure of buttocks than Buttman? The 74-year-old Stagliano, whose Southern California home was destroyed in the 2025 Pacific Palisades wildfires, is also the owner of Evil Angel (warning: link is to explicit content) and was the target of a 2010 federal obscenity prosecution that began under the George W. Bush administration and continued under Obama's. (All charges were dismissed; Reason's archive on the case and related issues is here.)
Stagliano has been a Reason reader since the early 1970s and is a donor to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website. His politics are distinctly libertarian, favoring free speech, the right of consenting adults to live however they wish, lower taxes, less regulation, minimal intervention abroad, and little to no government generally. He tells me that he voted for the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in the three races in which Trump was a candidate.
"Are you asking if I think he's a repressed homosexual?" says Stagliano. "It does appear that there might be some inkling in that direction based on his smile at the end of his comments on [Husted's ass]….But what do we do with that? Is it valuable as a mocking item? I don't think so. We don't care that Trump might be gay or might have some homosexual desires."
Stagliano says that while Trump certainly seems to be libertine in his personal life, that's the least of his concerns with the president. "He's certainly not going to take his lascivious inclinations and make policy from them, I don't think," he notes, laughing. "I don't want enforced libertinism. I want people to behave the way they normally would behave."
I ask him if Trump's comments are less a function of anything specifically sexual and more a reflection of older people losing their filters as well as their focus as they age. "I do think that you lose some things as you get older. And one of the things that you lose might be some inhibitions," says Stagliano, who is surprised to learn that the president is 80 years old. "I thought he wasn't that old. Goddamn."
He emphasizes that he can't speak for Trump, but says his attraction to butts was "preprogrammed" in him. When he started to make porn, he explains, "People were willing to talk about tits, but reluctant to talk about ass. And I was attracted to ass because it made my dick hard. And then the more I looked at ass, the more it made my dick hard, which sounds silly. But the body doesn't lie."
Stagliano was going out to vote later in the day and said that he'd opt toward whatever Libertarian candidates were on the ballot. "I couldn't care less," he says. "I vote Libertarian. That's what I do. I really think the cost of [learning about specific candidates] is far greater than the benefit." He suggested that Trump and other politicians would do best to leave "the voluntary interactions of men and women alone," and not just in the sexual sphere.
Born in Chicago in 1951, Stagliano moved to California in the very late 1960s, attending UCLA and being an early Chippendales dancer. He ruminates over the ways in which California has become more and more overtaxed and regulated, but also says that the Golden State has "positives"—natural beauty, culture, and tolerance, among others—that he doesn't think lower-tax states such as Florida and Texas can match. Such states are more socially conservative, he says, noting that it's good that different places have different vibes, while subject to constitutional limits on what governments can do. "I think freedom works in ways that people don't understand," he says. "The good outcomes have been plentiful."
Stagliano agrees that freedom can't simply be quantified by the amount of tax spending or the number of laws on the books. This comes from a man who is working diligently to rebuild his house amid one of the great red-tape clusterfucks of all time (as of July 2026, out of 5,000 single-family homes destroyed in the Palisades fire, only 28 had been completely rebuilt and issued occupancy certificates). He stresses that the less government does, the fewer problems he sees.
"It comes down to where you've regulated stuff," he argues. "If there's a mix of public property and private property, almost always the fault is with the fact that it's a mix, and if it was all private, there'd be an easy solution. These are old libertarian arguments that we used to have in the early '70s where I first learned the meaning of the word pontificate."
