Melania Trump has a list of things she wishes her husband would stop doing onstage, and he just shared it with a cheering crowd.
President Donald Trump told a rally crowd in Bullhead City, Ariz., on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, that First Lady Melania Trump had asked him to drop his onstage impression of a transgender weightlifter — then he performed it anyway, grunts included.
Trump, 80, was talking about an unidentified transgender weightlifter when he paused to share his wife’s reviews. “My wife is going crazy with me,” he told supporters, quoting her as saying, “You’re president of the United States, you shouldn’t be doing this.” Seconds later he was hoisting an imaginary barbell over his head and grunting for the crowd.
A Gentle Wave and ‘Goodbye, Everyone’
The first lady’s second note, according to her husband, concerns his walk-off dance to the Village People’s “YMCA.” Trump said she wants him to skip the dancing and leave with a gentle wave instead, then mimicked the request onstage with a flutter of the hand and a breezy “Goodbye, everyone.”
He kept going, quoting her again: “You should not dance off the stage, my darling. I love you very much, but please, don’t do that.” Trump also called the song the “gay national anthem” and claimed it helped him win the highest gay vote of any Republican in history. Then, at the end of the Arizona rally, he danced off the stage.
The song itself has a history with the president. Village People frontman Victor Willis, who co-wrote “YMCA” and died in June 2026, threatened in 2024 to sue anyone who described the track as a gay anthem. The band still performed at his inauguration festivities in January 2025.
Wasilla Crowd Votes to Keep Going
The routine got an earlier airing on Tuesday, Oct. 13, in Wasilla, Alaska, where Trump campaigned for Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. He told the crowd his wife hates when he talks about this and calls it “so unelegant, darling,” and said he answered her by pointing out that he had just won the election in a landslide and asking to be left alone.
Then came the barbell bit again — and a moment of mock hesitation. “Oh, my wife hates this … she said it’s so damn unpresidential,” Trump said, before asking the crowd whether he should finish. The audience cheered, he thanked them, and he finished.
Trump wrapped up the Alaska stretch by calling transgender athletes in women’s sports “so demeaning” to women. Wasilla, about 45 miles north of Anchorage, is the hometown of former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and the 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.”
No Melania at the Midterm Rallies
The first lady, who has made anti-bullying her signature issue, has not appeared at any of her husband’s midterm rallies as Republicans work to protect their grip on Congress before Election Day on Nov. 3. The weightlifter impression is not new to the act: Trump has done it since at least May 2025, and he has been saying for months that Melania Trump dislikes it.
Who exactly he is describing remains unclear. At a Texas rally, he offered another domestic detail, claiming his wife calls him “Sir” at home.
The rally riffs landed alongside claims from author Michael Wolff, who wrote in his Substack newsletter Howl that people inside the White House believed the couple’s marriage was probably at its lowest point since the Stormy Daniels trial. The White House rejects that account, and White House spokesman Steven Cheung accused Wolff of fabricating stories and challenged his credibility. Wolff had previously alleged in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” that the Trumps kept separate bedrooms.
Melania Trump gave her own version of the feedback loop during a Sept. 23 appearance on “Fox & Friends,” where she said she praised the delivery of her husband’s U.N. General Assembly speech. “Sometimes he doesn’t want to hear what I tell him, but that’s okay,” she said.
