President Donald Trump’s handpicked Texas Senate candidate is struggling to even fill a hotel sports bar.
Only a few dozen people attended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s campaign rally on Wednesday, a video MeidasTouch shared on X has revealed.
The rally took place at the Arc Light Bar & Grill in San Angelo, Texas, as part of Paxton’s “Come and Take It Tour,” according to event information shared on his campaign website.
The restaurant, inside the Clarion Hotel, says it manages the hotel’s banquet room, a 4,000-square-foot ballroom described as “a premier venue where the who’s who of political and community leaders frequently host their meetings, conferences, and high-profile gatherings.”
The banquet room can hold up to 300 people, according to the venue’s website. But Paxton did not book that room. His rally appears to have been held in the venue’s “Video Wall Room,” which appears to hold roughly 100 people at maximum capacity.
However, the room seemed even more sparsely seated than its standard layout, with tables removed from the center section in favor of two small rows of stadium chairs.
Paxton spoke for only 15 minutes at the event, according to a rally video shared on Facebook.
The Daily Beast asked Paxton’s campaign why he did not book the venue’s banquet room for his rally.
The 63-year-old Republican’s event came just one day after Trump, 80, joined him for two rallies in Texas, which drew much larger crowds. At his first rally on Tuesday in Corpus Christi, Paxton mistakenly called this year’s Independence Day celebration the nation’s bicentennial.
“So I want to finish, as you know, uh, July 4, we celebrated something pretty cool,” Paxton said. “We celebrated the 200th anniversary of our country.”
His opponent, Democratic state representative James Talarico, quickly corrected him, adding a jab about the European getaway he took with his mistress over the most recent July 4 weekend.
“It was actually our 250th anniversary,” Talarico, 37, wrote in response to a clip of Paxton’s error on X. “Not that you would know—you spent it with the British.”
Later that evening at a rally in Lubbock, Trump repeated his bizarre line about examining Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s “a--,” this time ending it with a barb to Paxton.
I made the mistake of studying his anatomy and explaining it to the audience, and the audience loved it,” Trump rambled. “By the way, he went up 12 points that day. He went from being down to being up.”
“Maybe I should do that with Ken Paxton, but I’m not sure your body is gonna qualify,” Trump added.
