This week in Texas, Donald Trump is supposed to preside over a watershed moment in his political career. It marks the first “midterm convention” in the history of his party — built entirely around him — and held over two nights in a downtown arena in Dallas. And right now, it’s shaping up to be a flop.
The Republicans who are supposed to be running under his banner are instead running away from it. White Trump will attend alongside his Vice President, JD Vance; no-shows will include top GOP senators, candidates in the tightest races in the country, and his own wife, who’ve all found somewhere else to be. Of more than 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress surveyed by Politico, a majority (45) said they either weren’t going or wouldn’t commit.
For a man who returned to office wielding threats and at the apex of his power, the event will signal a haemorrhaging of his influence.
I’m writing this from Dallas, where the vibe is precisely the opposite of what the President ordered. This was meant to be the career-maker’s convention, held in honour of the man who anoints winners and is gathering chosen candidates around him ahead of an election that will be a referendum on his leadership. But it’s becoming a magnet for the people whose careers he tried to wreck and the opposition party he’s empowered his authorities to repress. They are the ones flying in to protest, mock, and counter-message.
Back in June, the Republican Party chairman Joe Gruters promised America that this would be “Trump-a-palooza” (as if that’s something Americans wanted). His word, not mine. It would be two bombastic nights showcasing the President’s accomplishments and what Gruters called his unwavering commitment to restoring America. Seats are slated to cost some attendees up to $25,000 (£18,500).
The American Airlines Center during preparations for the Republican National Committee Midterm Convention, which kicks off in on Dallas, Texas (Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty)In the last few weeks, the panic has evidently set in. Trump’s 4 July gathering in the United States already signalled how soft his support was getting; the event was marred by thin crowds and mid-range celebrities cancelling their appearances. And that was for America’s 250th birthday that he co-opted.
Now, it is being reported that Texans have been getting unsolicited texts offering free tickets to see the President. The messages have looked so much like scams that local news stations ran segments confirming they were real. In a matter of a month, the event organisers have gone from charging exorbitant ticket prices to basically begging strangers to attend.
I can tell you where the panic is emanating from. In the first administration, when I worked with the White House on scheduling events for the President, no event was ever really approved until some very specific questions came back from the ether: What’s the capacity? Are the seats filled? How many? The questions never arrived with a name attached, of course, but everybody knew who was asking. Equivocating answers could kill a confirmed event or shift it to another date, because the man behind the curtain couldn’t bear walking out to tepid applause. He measured his power in crowd size.
It also wasn’t just the numbers. Trump literally micromanaged what the crowd looked like. In the spring of 2019, I was helping arrange a presidential visit to the border, and the word came down that he wanted the officials in the photographs to look tough. Like soldiers. No beards. Tight jawlines. Beefy. We thought the request was bizarre. Sure enough, when he got there, he moved down the line shaking hands, put an awkward hand on one agent’s shoulder, looked him up and down, and said: “You look like you’re straight out of central casting.”
Donald Trump is expected to attend alongside Vice President JD Vance and a host of Republican leaders (Photo: Kent Nishimura/AFP)That’s the man about to walk into an arena with a very different cast than he hoped. This time, he has no escape. He announced this event himself, beat his chest about it, and set the expectations sky high before anyone could run the numbers and realise it was a political catastrophe.
What’s already apparent before the convention kicks off is that the absences aren’t really about scheduling. Something has shifted politically underneath the President’s feet, and the polling shows it. Last week, Gallup found that 89 per cent of Americans now believe that government corruption is widespread. That’s up 16 points since Trump was re-elected, and the sentiment is shared by supermajorities of both Democrats and Republicans. Americans now rate their own government the most corrupt in the developed world. And the leader of one political party is to blame.
His own side is so disgusted by self-aggrandisement – the ballroom, the reflecting pool, the triumphal arch, his face on buildings and coins, his signature on the currency – that he can’t even get his own candidates to show up for an event ostensibly focused on their re-election. He can’t get Texans to believe a free ticket isn’t a scam. Why would they? Everything this administration touches has been tainted by corruption, and it’s finally caught up to him.
The people who are actually flying into Dallas this week tell the rest of the story. Democratic donors are holding fundraisers a short drive from the arena. There’s a press conference with the US Senate candidate for Texas, James Talarico — whose insurgent Democratic candidacy is one of the reasons Republicans are holding this event in the state, which has historically been deep red. Liberal House candidates, pro-democracy organisers, and ex-Trump administration officials who’ve turned on him are all coming into the area.
Jeffrey Epstein survivors have organised a Trump-Epstein Bookmobile, pictured in Washington, to descend on Dallas for the convention – carrying all 3.5 million printed Epstein filesMeanwhile, more than a dozen survivors of abuse by Trump and Jeffrey Epstein are here in town, which is why I’m here, too. They’ve brought all 3.5 million printed Epstein Files with them in order to pull the spotlight away from Trump’s stage and, instead, to swing a searchlight onto his administration’s cover-up of the largest sex crimes investigation in American history. The pop-up display is already set to draw media away from the arena where Trump wanted their cameras and onto a subject he’s tried vainly to get them to ignore. The President wanted an arena full of confetti. What he’s getting is paper of a different kind.
There’s no doubt it’s a watershed moment. Donald Trump and his team are about to spend two nights in an arena he evidently couldn’t fill… in a city that didn’t want him… at an event his own party is avoiding… while the people he spent years trying to intimidate arrive en masse to tell the truth about him.
Trumpapalooza indeed.
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