The US midterms are in full swing, with President Donald Trump making various rally stops to boost his Republican candidates. While the cost of living, the Iran conflict and national debt are likely top of voters’ minds, the President appears to be preoccupied on other matters: specifically, Ohio senator Jon Husted’s ass.
“I’m studying his body… I looked at his ass. I said, ‘His ass, it’s like a pile of muscle,’” Trump, 80, marvelled over Husted during an October 20 rally in North Carolina. “Then I looked at his legs and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’”
Although Trump doth protest that he’d “never studied the body of a man before” — it’s not his “thing” — as with many things that come out of the President’s mouth, the facts say otherwise.
When will the UK rejoin the Erasmus plus scheme?
The Government has confirmed the UK will rejoin the Erasmus plus student exchange scheme from the start of January.
Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer said applications would open next month for young people who will be able to study, train or get work experience in the EU.
What you need to know
- Falconer emphasised to MPs that the opportunities would be open to “educational institutions of all kinds”.
- Work on the UK joining the Erasmus programme was announced as part of former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s post-Brexit reset deal with Brussels in 2025.
- The UK left the scheme under Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal in 2020, with the then-prime minister arguing it did not offer value for money.
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What was it replaced by?
- It was replaced by the Turing Scheme, which was ended when the Government announced the new deal over Erasmus plus.
- The Government has previously said it expects more than 100,000 people to be able to benefit.
As well as university-based study exchanges, Erasmus plus allows further education students and apprentices to take up work placements in European firms.
Applications open this November. They are not simply for undergraduate university students. They are for educational institutions of all kinds.
Hamish Falconer
All cost of living help that could come in the Budget
From energy bills support to a minimum wage hike, here are all of the measures John Healey could announce in the Budget to offer Brits some relief.
Chancellor under pressure
The Chancellor will come under intense pressure to ease cost of living pressures on households up and down the UK in his maiden Budget on 28 October.
Labour has already unveiled a number of everyday fixes but households struggling will no doubt be looking for further support.
So, what help could be on the way and how much could it save you? Here, we look at the options.
What help might be coming?
- Energy bills help: A typical dual-fuel household would save £27 a year if gas standing charges were abolished and the costs were shifted into the gas unit price.
- Fuel duty tax hike delay: Delaying the hike could save around £2.75 compared with the full duty rate on a 55-litre tank.
- Minimum wage increase: The adult rate could rise by around 3.9 per cent to £13.20 from April 2027.
- Food tariffs: Recent cuts to these tariff cuts will save consumers up to £21 a year – around 40p a week.
- Carer’s allowance changes: The Government is changing the rules so unpaid carers no longer lose their allowance for earning over weekly limit.
- Paternity pay: The Government has said it will extend parental pay to over 150,000 additional parents per year.
Three-quarters of pilots have fallen asleep in the cockpit
Three in four European pilots have admitted to falling asleep in the cockpit.
A new study
Research commissioned by the European Cockpit Association, asked 7,200 captains and first officers about their tiredness levels while on shift.
A total of 77 per cent of respondents reported having at least one “microsleep” – a brief, unintentional sleep – while operating an aircraft in the four weeks prior to the survey.
The findings
- One in four pilots admitted to five or more microsleeps during the same four-week period, while 7 per cent admitted to having 10 or more.
- Of the pilots working for British airlines, 54 per cent said they had slept between one and four times.
- A further 13 per cent said they had fallen asleep more than five times and 6 per cent admitted to falling asleep more than 10 times.
If we are serious about managing the safety risks related to pilot fatigue, the numbers we see in this report – and the lack of any meaningful improvement over the past three years – are a clear wake-up call for airlines, authorities and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency that something must change in the way Europe deals with pilot fatigue
Captain Tanja Harter, president of the European Cockpit Association
Is ferritin face real? What iron levels can really tell you
Ferritin face is a trend sweeping social media, but is it real? Here is everything you need to know.
What is ferritin face?
The term, trending on social media outlets like TikTok, refers to a supposed symptom of a lack of ferritin – the protein that stores iron in the body – affecting a person’s complexion.
People have attributed everything from dull or pale skin and dark circles under the eyes to a generally exhausted-looking complexion to low ferritin.
What is ferritin?
- 1Your ferritin levels show how good your body’s iron stores are, while haemoglobin is the protein in red blood cells which carries oxygen.
- 2When haemoglobin is low, blood cannot carry as much oxygen – a condition known as anaemia.
- 3However, iron stores can become depleted before that happens, meaning someone can be iron-deficient and have symptoms without being anaemic.
Is ferritin face real?
Ferritin face is not widely recognised among GPs, and not a medical term or diagnosis.
Some of the changes people describe as “ferritin face”, such as paler skin and dark eye circles, can occur with iron deficiency.
However, Dr Max Draper, GP at MyAtlas Health Clinic told The i Paper it’s “certainly not diagnostic”.
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The signs of low iron
- Other symptoms include hair loss, spoon-shaped nails, cold hands and feet, and odd cravings called pagophagia – such as craving ice – and being drawn to the smell of petrol, paint or the desire to chew paper or clay.
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How much benefits payments will rise by after the Budget
Benefit claimants are expected to see their payments go up in line with inflation.
What’s happening to benefits?
Benefit claimants will see their payments boosted next year in a move that could cost the Government up to £5.5bn, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
Some 10 million Britons claiming working-age benefits are set to see a rise of at least 3.5 per cent from next spring, with ministers expected to increase rates in line with inflation.
What’s happening to benefits?
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has also confirmed that it will not freeze benefits, with the uplift rates set to be confirmed in the Budget on Wednesday.
Disability and carers’ benefits – such as personal independence payment (PIP) and carer’s allowance – must rise at least in line with inflation.
However, ministers can decide whether to raise, cut or freeze most other working-age benefits, such as child benefit.
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What it means for pounds and pence
- 1The Resolution Foundation said that, from April, the standard allowance in universal credit for a single person over 25 will rise by 4.3 per cent (or £4.23) to £102.28 a week. It will rise by £6.63 to £160.55 a week for couples.
- 2This would mean a single person under 25 on universal credit could see a rise of £150 a year, while a couple over the age of 25 will see their payments rise by nearly £350 a year.
- 3Claimants may also see further energy bills support announced in the Budget, but it remains to be seen how much this could be and who would be eligible.
Nurses, doctors and teachers ‘face real-terms pay cut’
The news comes as nurses, doctors and teachers face pay awards that risk leaving them worse off as the cost of living climbs, according to trade unions.
- The Government says its plans for 2027-28 can accommodate a 2.4 per cent increase to NHS staff pay without trade-offs against its main health commitments.
- However, ministers have warned that giving NHS staff a pay rise above 2.4 per cent next year could hit patient care.
A closer look at the detail
Teachers, meanwhile, have been awarded a 3.5 per cent pay rise – while in line with inflation, unions argue it is below the 3.9 per cent Retail Prices Index (RPI) rate of inflation.
However, unions have warned this is an older measure of inflation that generally tracks higher than the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), on which inflation is set, and that the deal therefore amounts to a real-terms pay cut.
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What is the DWP saying?
We want to build a welfare system that incentivises work and supports those who need it most, but the system we inherited denied people the support and opportunities they need to move into work.
DWP spokesperson
The MPs who claim they were denied access to West Bank
Two MPs and an MSP have claimed they were detained by Israeli authorities and denied access to the West Bank.
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What happened?
Labour’s Clive Lewis and the SNP’s Lara Bird, along with Kate Nevens of the Scottish Greens, sought to access the territory on Monday as part of a delegation organised by political group Progressive International.
According to Progressive International, the group – which also included former MP Sam Tarry and Spanish Senator Josu Estarrona Elizondo – was detained by the Israeli authorities for eight hours.
What was the group’s plan?
The group was stopped while making the crossing from Jordan and had planned to undertake “a programme of meetings with Palestinian academics, students and civil society organisations” as well as join the olive harvest following what it claims are “mounting attacks” against farmers in the territory.
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What did the group claim?
- In a post on X, Lewis said: “For more than eight hours, we were held, interrogated and made to feel as though we had done something wrong simply by attempting to enter. The simple truth is we had done nothing wrong.”
- Bird posted: “I came to stand alongside Palestinians being attacked for harvesting olives on their own land. Instead, we were turned away, with no reason given.”
In fact, Trump gushed over Husted’s college football-sculpted physique a week earlier at an October 12 rally in Ohio, and again during an October 17 rally in Kentucky. “He came up, and he was talking very nicely, and I stood right over here, and I examined his ass,” Trump said. “I never did that with a man before.”
And he didn’t stop there. “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders, I looked at his feet, I looked at his hand, I looked at his jawline, studying… I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel. I’m still recovering.”
The world seems to have a lot to say about Trump’s fixation with Husted’s body. A headline declared his recent pitstops, “The Last Tour for Our Horny, Mad King.” Meanwhile CNN’s Anderson Cooper, dubbing the President “assman-in-chief”, pointed out that Trump’s thirsting wasn’t limited to just Husted. He well and truly dispelled the notion that noticing men’s physical attributes wasn’t Trump’s “thing” by pointing out that it actually was, with a montage of the President commenting on a whole host of other men’s bodies.
They included House of Representatives candidate Ed Gallrein (whom he described as coming straight from “central casting”) and NFL players Harrison Butker (“a good-looking sucker”) and Jaxson Dart (“a beautiful guy” with “legs like tree trunks”).
The contrast with the behaviour of his Vice President, JD Vance, and the open hostility to the LGBT community from his Maga base is extraordinary. This month when a man yelled “I love you” at Vance during he rally, he quickly replied: “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the Vice President, not James Talarico [the straight Democrat Senate candidate for Texas]”, in a comment many condemned as homophobic.
Of course, Trump has for years expressed delight at the physical appearance of some men. He has surrounded himself with those who – like masculinity-obsessed Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth – he deems to be straight from “central casting”, always the phrase he reserves for particularly chiselled jawlines and pronounced muscles. But the past few weeks have seen a marked escalation in his ruminations on the male body.
Trump’s apparent obsession with looks may stem from his pre-political career in the vanity-obsessed world of reality television as host of , or perhaps from his former stewardship of the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants. And it isn’t just reserved for men. On Sunday, Trump spent some time at a Michigan rally commenting on the buttocks of rapper Nicki Minaj – although Husted’s own behind got an honourable mention too.
Still, in the case of Husted, it’s more than a little bizarre for a sitting president to apply casting call standards to the world of politics. In the infamous words of Kourtney Kardashian, “Kim, there’s people that are dying”. (Indeed, there are people dying under the Trump administration, not least the 52 people in ICE custody since Trump’s second presidential term began, per Human Rights Watch figures.)
The President’s fascination with men’s bodies over the years has been itself a source of fascination among political watchers. In 2025, Trump’s estranged niece, Mary L Trump, told the that he was frequently beguiled by his brother — and Mary’s father — Fred Trump Jr’s good looks. He once described Fred, who died in 1981 aged 42, as “handsome as could be”. Mary said: “He used to say that about my dad all the time. Back then, it was sort of like, ‘Freddy was kind of a loser, but at least he was handsome.’”
Mary, a psychologist and author, opined that Trump’s outsized compliments towards other men could be an attempt to ingratiate himself to others. According to his niece, “it’s very, very, very important to him that the other person like him”.
Could a bro-to-bro compliment on one’s ass, for example, be Trump’s attempt to disarm and seduce both voters and his political peers?
“It’s [partly] Trump playing the role of a Borscht Belt comedian, working the room,” Dan Cassino, professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, tells The i Paper. “He knows being outrageous gets a response at rallies, so he says things that will get a rise out of his audience, like praising a man’s ass or talking about Arnold Palmer’s penis.”
At a 2024 campaign rally, Trump gushed over the size of the champion golfer’s penis, drawing criticism from Palmer’s daughter over disrespecting her late father’s memory.
Cassino added: “The message there is mostly, ‘Can you believe I’m saying this stuff?’ using outré statements as a signal of sincerity.”
More than just pandering for votes and approval, Cassino says, “Trump — like many Americans — associates masculine traits with leadership traits”, and his comments reinforce that ideology.
“As such, every candidate, male and female, has to perform masculinity in some way to prove to voters that they’re capable of being a leader,” Cassino explains. “This is why you get so many ads of candidates with guns, or touting military service or, in this cycle, bench pressing heavy weights.”
“So when Trump praises a man’s body, saying that he’s big or muscular or has big hands or feet as an oblique way of saying he has a large penis, he’s saying that this candidate is masculine, so he can be presumed to have the masculine leadership traits voters want.”
But there is another important aspect to this news cycle we must consider. For all the derision Trump has faced because of his compliments, alongside the homoerotic subtext that the public has gleefully read into, should society take a look in the mirror itself?
The more interesting question is why expressions of admiration between men sometimes generate discomfort or speculation in the first place, says psychologist Dr John Moore, the founder of men’s mental health publication Guy Counseling. “That tells us something about the expectations we continue to place on men and how they express themselves,” he adds.
“Historically, many men have been socialised to be cautious about expressing admiration for another man’s physical appearance,” Moore continues. “Traditional expectations surrounding masculinity often emphasise emotional restraint, and some men may worry that complimenting another man could be misinterpreted as expressing sexual attraction.”
He adds that recognising that another man is physically attractive doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sexual orientation. “Men can appreciate another man’s appearance in much the same way they might admire his confidence, athletic ability, or personal style.”
Perhaps we ought to interrogate why we are so easily bemused when Trump comments on other men’s bodies when we’re rightfully aghast when he comments on women’s appearances.