It clearly meant a lot to President Donald Trump that he would play to a packed house here in Dallas at the Republicans’ midterm convention this week.
“We’re going to have a tremendous crowd tonight. It’s sold out. Looks very big,” he told reporters Wednesday before boarding Air Force One for the flight to Texas. “We’re going to be sold out tonight, just so you understand,” he repeated.
The Republican National Committee had tried its best to deliver such a crowd for Trump. When ticket orders didn’t come in as hoped, the RNC first reduced prices, then offered tickets for free in a lottery.
But it turns out they couldn’t even give ’em away.
When Trump took the stage just after 8 p.m. local time, I was watching from the largely empty upper level of the American Airlines Center. I multiplied the number of seats in a row by the number of rows and the number of sections and calculated there were roughly 5,000 empty seats — nearly a quarter of the arena.
It was embarrassing. And so Trump doubled down on his capacity-crowd canard.
“This place is packed!” he proclaimed — and his supporters let out a huge cheer. “And not only is this packed,” he said, “but you have an equal number of people standing outside.”
Trump asked if anybody wanted to give up their seats to those supposedly stuck outside.
“No!” came cries from the crowd.
Later in the speech, he expanded on his fantasy: “I’m looking at this massive crowd. It’s filled all the way upstairs, all the way. There’s a lot of people outside.”
Those in the hall need only have looked up to see that it was all nonsense. Or they could have checked outside, as I did, and found that there was nobody there except for the people selling Trump rubber duckies, Trump plush dolls, Trump-endorsed Bibles and T-shirts portraying Trump as the Marlboro Man.
Instead, the convention-goers joined him, willingly, in this alternate reality. When I posted videos of the empty seats, MAGA faithful online retorted that I was a liar — and that they knew this from watching their TVs.
I’ve given up guessing whether Trump is so farblondjet that he believes his own nonsense. But it was fitting that the crowd participated in perpetuating the fiction he was creating. In a broader sense, the entire convention was an elaborate group effort in deception.
Organizers called it a convention even though there was no party business to conduct. They randomly chose people in a lottery as “delegates” and “alternates,” though neither had any purpose. They put up placards for the state “delegations” on the floor, adding in one for Trump superfans called the “Front Row Joes.”
And the Republicans’ land of make believe went well beyond appearance. I sat in the hall for five straight hours Wednesday night, listening to every word and then producing an AI transcript from the recording. I (and my AI) may have missed something, but in all the hours before Trump took the stage I found only one mention of Iran — and that came four hours into the event, in a video featuring Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowing “retribution against their ayatollah.”
That was it for Iran. The brief video ended, the DJ started playing “Footloose” — and the conventioneers got up and danced. Then Dr. Oz came out to discuss drug prices.
There were only three mentions of gas prices in that entire evening and only 10 mentions of inflation (most of those blaming it on Joe Biden). By contrast, there were 17 mentions of trans people threatening women’s and girls’ sports, 73 mentions of the border, 31 of illegal immigrants, 27 of socialists and 14 of communists.
Thursday brought more of the same. Over one typical 90-minute stretch, speakers managed 19 mentions of communists and eight of the alleged trans threat (with a couple of bonus warnings about Sharia law) but only one invocation of high gas prices — Biden’s — and not a peep about the Iran war.
That alternate reality, in which America’s biggest problem isn’t inflation or the Iran war but men in girls’ locker rooms, was dutifully carried to the MAGA faithful by the various organs present in the arena and on media row: LindellTV, “The Scott Jennings Show” and One America News. Fox News had more space on the convention floor than any delegation.
“Maybe Democrats look at this convention and say, ‘Wow, maybe we want to do the same thing next year,’” a Newsmax correspondent proclaimed in his standup in the arena.
Unlikely.
The convention’s main achievement, if it can be called that, is that it reminded America that the GOP has become a party of, by and for Donald Trump — whose support now stands in the low 30s.
“Republicans are hoping President Donald Trump won’t make this week’s GOP midterm convention all about himself,” Politico reported this week.
They might as well have hoped it would snow in Dallas.
The folly in thinking that the convention would be something other than a “Trumpapalooza” comes from a failure to grasp that the Republican Party has reinvented itself around Trump. It is less a party of ideology (free trade? free markets? limited government?) than a cult of personality. Take Trump out of the GOP and it is a hollow shell.
And now Trump has driven his party into a ditch. Intractable war in Iran. Oil at $105 a barrel. A trade war with Canada. Trump responding to the crises by minting coins with his visage, posting a cartoon of him beating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, making up a 9/11 story about how he was lifted from the rubble and threatening to rename New Mexico as New America.
As if to provide a metaphor for the moment, an emergency escape slide accidentally deployed on Trump’s Qatari-donated Air Force One Wednesday, briefly delaying his flight to Texas.
But there is no easy escape for Republicans who want to distance themselves from the unpopular president. The credentials for the convention featured various action photos of Trump. Conventioneers were invited to dine at the “47 Make It Great Again Grill” and to buy Trump-autographed guitars and other Trump memorabilia. On the arena’s second level, the walls were lined with posters showing the president in 18 heroic poses: with cowboy hat, signing autographs, addressing rallies and pumping his fist after the assassination attempt. Each one in a series of videos interspersed through the program similarly lionized Trump (including one video with actual lions). “God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” announced one video, from Trump’s 2024 run.
Joe Gruters, the party’s chairman, opened the meeting by calling Trump “the greatest Republican messenger of our lifetime, the leader of America’s comeback, the best president this country has ever had.”
And it went on from there. Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued GOP Senate nominee from Texas, said Trump “delivered more for this country than anyone before.”
Jay Feely, a Republican congressional candidate from Arizona, recalled for the crowd: “With blood on his face, President Trump raised a fist and he told this nation to fight!”
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” chanted the crowd.
Organizers brought out a UFC fighter, who praised Trump for hosting “an epic UFC fight on the lawn of the White House.” They also presented a man who had been serving a life sentence for drug trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering before Trump pardoned him. He praised Trump’s “compassion.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might have topped them all by calling Trump “a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopedic grasp of issues in molecular detail.” Gushed Kennedy: “I’m so grateful to God for giving us a leader like this.”
But nobody was going to praise Trump more than Trump. “The Hormuz Strait, we should call it the Trump Strait,” he proposed. “I should get something out of it.” Observing (erroneously) that nobody had left the hall even as his speech approached two hours, he called it “a great tribute to Trump … everybody loves me and I love everybody.” He had his supporters raise their right hands to pledge “to the greatest president in the history of the United States” that they would vote.
The pretend convention had many of the familiar Trump flourishes.
There was the bungled implementation, scheduling it for the same time as the opening of the NFL season. Technical glitches produced the wrong images on stage, and a disembodied voice interfered with Attorney General Todd Blanche’s speech. An apparent failure to vet speeches meant that two speakers made the same joke disparaging Native American “land recognitions.” At the Sheraton in downtown Dallas, an appearance by Vice President JD Vance overlapped with a trade show for aestheticians, which promoted such services as “cadaver lab production.” (No word on whether the vice president bought eyeliner at the show.)
And there was constant return to dark themes of fear and rage. An overwrought Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina preached to the crowd: “We know who God is! We’re talking Jeeeeeesus! I said the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords!” Democrats, by contrast, would “rip that heart out of our chests. They hate our culture. They hate what it means to be American.”
Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican, shouted about the “disgusting,” “sick” and “evil” Democrats.
House Speaker Mike Johnson likewise warned about “Marxism, communism, socialism. It is a road to human suffering and death.”
“Communism is on the march!” proclaimed Donald Trump Jr., who conjured a “left-wing hellscape” and the “darkness we are all up against.”
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas warned of “communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democratic Party.” He invoked gulags, starvation, misery, murder, oppression and barbarism.
Such words have consequences. As Cruz attacked three Democrats by name, a man in the crowd repeatedly shouted: “He should be shot!”
And after all that vitriol and rage, Vance, Thursday night’s keynoter, had the temerity to announce that “Democrats are the party of hatred.” When a lone demonstrator waved a Mexican flag during his speech, Vance responded: “If you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there. I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”
It was an apocalyptic vision on the floor. Off the floor, high-rollers paid as much as $100,000 a head to attend fundraisers with top GOP officials. Trump’s family and other VIPs sat on their usual white thrones just off the convention floor. A fleet of black Mercedes vans lined up outside the Ritz-Carlton to whisk the party faithful to the arena, even though it was about an eight-minute walk.
But never mind such contradictions. And never mind that the broader public is disenchanted with Trump. Those here were the hard core.
“I’ve seen Trump 156 times,” said Mike Boatman, a leader of the Front Row Joes who drove here from Indiana. “I’ve never wavered.”
“Trump is the most popular person on the planet,” averred Nick Passino, wearing a “MAGA Boyz” shirt.
“People here are still enthusiastic,” said Blake Marnell, who demonstrated his loyalty by wearing a suit and tie with a brick pattern meant to represent a border wall.
They most certainly are, in their homemade Trump-themed dresses and jackets and cowboy hats. Some wore “Trump Was Right About Everything” caps, and “Born to Ride for 45” T-shirts and glitter tops spelling out Trump.
They booed Senate Majority Leader John Thune for being insufficiently loyal to Trump, and they applauded Democratic Sen. John Fetterman for breaking with his fellow Democrats. They gave a cheer for the “J6” offenders, pardoned by Trump for their role in the 2021 attack on the Capitol.
And they ate up every word of Trump’s speeches: his outburst about Democratic “bullshit”; his mockery of Paxton as “not … the best looking guy”; his proposed $5,000 payment to every American if Republicans retain their majorities in the midterms; his claims that he won the 2020 election; his bizarre tangent into a masturbation joke; his belief that “nobody knows that ‘dumb’ has a ‘b’ at the end of it”; and his grievance about “radical left communists” who “tried to persecute me … attempted to put me in jail and even tried to kill me.”
But what will the rest of America think when they hear that Trump again called affordability a “fake” word and boasted that “this has been the most successful two years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency”?
Republicans’ best hope is that they didn’t hear it — which is probably a good bet if the attendance problem in the arena was an accurate gauge of public interest. Attendance was no better Thursday, so organizers simply cut off access to the entire third level and its several thousand seats.
And Trump? He just kept embellishing his crowd-size fiction. In a Truth Social post Thursday, he called the convention a “sold out hit” and said TV viewership “beat the NFL,” although no such numbers existed. “The Arena … beat its own attendance record,” he went on.
When he returned at the end of Thursday night to deliver a second speech that was much like the first, the pathology went even further. “No empty seats!” he announced. “Look at the upper ring,” he said of the entirely empty third level. “Everything is taken.” And anybody who says otherwise is “fake news.”
The crowd cheered. It was ludicrous. But I hope many Americans did tune in, for they would have seen that, at a time of great suffering, Donald Trump brought Republicans together for one more grand old party — for himself.
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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