Donald Trump touched down in north Georgia on Friday with 18 days left before the midterms and a Senate race slipping away from his party.
The crowd at Dalton Municipal Airport came for a pep rally. What they got sounded more like a Hollywood audition, with the 80-year-old president sizing up the men on his side of the ballot one by one.
For a man who still bristles over chatter about his own hair, Trump seemed oddly thrilled to play judge. And by the time he reached the candidate he flew in to sell, plenty of people watching at home were convinced he’d lost the plot entirely.
He warmed up on the other side of the aisle. Trump branded Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff a “weak, arrogant, radical left senator” and dusted off his favorite nickname for him, “Pee-Wee Herman,” according to C-SPAN footage highlighted by Mediaite. Then he went after the 39-year-old’s face.
“Somebody said he’s a good-looking man. I don’t think he’s a good-looking man,” Trump said.
The rally, which Newsweek reported was briefly interrupted by protesters, was supposed to be about one man’s record. Trump decided it was about his physique.
“I actually think Mike Collins is a good-looking man, and he’s all man. All man,” Trump announced of the Republican congressman trying to unseat Ossoff. “I’m not sure about Ossoff.”
He then called Collins to his feet like a contestant. “And he is Central Casting. Stand up! Look at this,” Trump said. “If I’m casting a movie for a senator, I like the white hair, I like the big, strong build. Big, strong guy. But that’s what I want.”
He wasn’t finished handing out reviews. In the same stretch of the speech, Trump also praised GOP gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson as handsome and distinguished-looking. Not one word in that stretch touched grocery bills or health care.
Collins has represented Georgia’s 10th Congressional District since 2023 and built a trucking business with his wife before heading to Washington. But his looks aren’t what’s sinking him.
A Trafalgar Group poll taken Oct. 7 to 9 had Ossoff up 51 percent to 43 percent, and the Cook Political Report shifted the race to “Likely Democrat” in late September.
Days earlier, the two men had debated affordability, immigration and the war with Iran. Ossoff has also hammered Collins over a pending House ethics investigation. Trump’s closing argument skipped all of it in favor of a hair-and-shoulders checklist.
Viewers weren’t buying the audition, especially after cameras caught participants filing out one by one in the middle of his big speech.
“He’s gone off the deep end,” one person wrote after the clip spread. Another argued Trump “really don’t give a damn about the substance of a person. He just care about them aesthetically and how they can benefit him.”
Others turned the spotlight back on the man holding the microphone. “So funny how he tries to project MAGA ‘physical strength’ while looking like a potato,” one commenter said.
Another person spotted a pattern. “So, every rally now is gonna feature this one openly opening about the attractiveness of the men he’s there to support?”
That pattern isn’t new. Just four days earlier in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump gushed about Sen. Jon Husted’s athletic build while stumping for the Republican’s reelection, an unscripted tangent he circled back to later in the same speech. He has also spent weeks publicly knocking the appearance of Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton, even as he insists voters should back him anyway.
The irony is hard to miss. Trump has spent much of 2026 fending off talk about his ever-changing hairdo, cycling through new colors, new parts and new excuses while critics zoom in on every gust of wind. Yet on Friday he was the one grading another man’s white hair as a qualification for office.
The stakes in Georgia go beyond one Senate seat. Jackson is clinging to a slim 49 percent to 47 percent edge over Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, in an InsiderAdvantage poll, according to Mediaite.
Georgians will decide on Nov. 3 whether Trump’s casting choice actually gets the part.
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