DALLAS — When Attorney General Ken Paxton took the stage at the GOP’s midterm convention early Wednesday evening, he was quick to heap praise on President Donald Trump.
“The press, the courts and the establishment all tried to take President Trump down, but he’s won every single time,” Paxton told conventiongoers at the beginning of his speech. “He’s delivered more for this country than anyone before, secured victories for America that no other president could, and always stood up for Texas. Thank you, Mr. President!”
And when Trump took the stage for his keynote address to close out the night, Paxton was the first candidate he mentioned by name, pledging to support the attorney general on the campaign trail.
“I’ll be coming back to Texas, because we have to elect Ken Paxton,” Trump said, drawing big cheers from the crowd at the American Airlines Center. “If I have to, I’ll come back twice or three times. You’ll say, ‘Get this guy out of here!’”
But the honor of being Trump’s top-of-mind candidate came with a catch — the president praised Paxton’s record while belittling his appearance in equal measure. Trump warned that his riffs on Paxton might be offensive and were not part of his planned remarks. Mimicking aides who begged him not to go there — after he’d ripped Paxton’s looks at multiple points in recent weeks — Trump could not help himself.
“Some may not like the way he dresses — although tonight he looked very spiffy in his blue suit, I must tell you,” Trump said. “I don’t. They may not like the way he talks. I can see that.”
On the trail, Paxton sometimes refers to the similarities between himself and Trump — both are beloved by the GOP base and, as Paxton frames it, victims of political persecution in the impeachments and indictments they have each survived.
Trump chose to emphasize different similarities.
“Some people don’t like the way I look either,” the president said. “You may not like the way he looks. But here’s the thing: In the history of Texas, he is the single greatest attorney general you’ve ever had, and maybe the top attorney general in the whole United States.”
Paxton was the only Senate candidate the president mentioned by name, until he got around to some others on the backend of his nearly two-hour speech. Trump himself is not on the ballot this fall, and part of the rationale for the first-of-its-kind convention is to highlight the Republicans in battleground races before an audience of national donors and supporters. The convention is occurring in Paxton’s backyard, amid a historically competitive Texas Senate race in which polling averages have Democrat James Talarico narrowly leading.
Trump — whose governing trifecta in Washington is on the line — pledged to visit every swing distrct and state this fall. Across his speech, he was blunt about his mission to inject himself in the midterms, with the implicit point that Republicans will need to activate their Trump-loving voters who tend to skip the non-presidential years.
“I”m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot — I’m on the ballot — just one more time,” Trump said. “Because if we lose, you’re going to lose your border, you’re going to lose your tax cuts, you’re going to lose your safety and security, you’re going to lose your wealth.”
The party in power historically sustains losses during midterms — a trend Trump acknowledged Wednesday night and which plagued the second half of his first term. But Trump’s efforts to buck the trend, by turning out lower-propensity voters, comes with a potential pitfall.
The president’s national approval rating reached a low of 32%, per a weekend survey from the Financial Times, and sat at 43% in Texas in the Texas Politics Project’s August poll. Democrats are hoping to sink down-ballot GOP candidates, including in Texas, by tying the president around their necks.
“This bizarre Republican midterm convention here can’t paper over the fact that Republicans have done nothing to earn your vote,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said alongside a cohort of Texas Democrats at a news conference Wednesday morning. “Nothing Republicans say over the next two days is going to change how clinically deranged and out of touch the GOP has been, and they chose the wrong place to hold this crime show of theirs because a new generation of candidates is rewriting the rules of Texas politics.”
But Trump believes he can outrun political history, and said the midterm convention is kicking off a campaign barnstorm to do so. And he promised voters a $5,000 dividend for every adult citizen if Republicans hold both chambers of Congress — a proposal that would be extraordinarily expensive and difficult to drive through what’s sure to be a narrowly divided Congress no matter who’s in control. Trump has made a handful of similar promises over the first half of his term and has yet to send out any checks.
Beyond Trump
Across six hours of programming Wednesday, Republicans stuck to a steady script: dubbing their opponents as socialists and radicals, often by casting the party’s most progressive voices as emblematic of the entire Democratic Party.
Talarico received a handful of mentions from the stage. He was derided by National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Tim Scott, Flower Mound Rep. Brandon Gill and by Paxton himself.
Talarico did not escape Trump’s comedy routine either — “he’s a weird looking dude,” the president riffed — before running through some of Republicans’ frequent hits on the Austin Democrat. Trump derided Talarico’s past comments on capitalism, Christianity and transgender kids in an aside that ran for three minutes, re-upping the same remarks featured in clips frequently circulated online by Paxton allies.
Talarico has referred to some of his past comments as cringey and said they “missed the mark.”
Trump also riffed on the popular Republican talking point that Talarico is a vegan — he is not — saying that the Democrat “was recently seen having a barbecue and eating a lot of meat … and then he was seen running backstage to a room and throwing up all over.”
But Talarico was far from the only villain for Republicans on Day One of the convention, which functioned as essentially a long-running campaign rally. Other targets included former President Joe Biden, former vice president Kamala Harris and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Speakers and video montages displayed on the big screen repeatedly picked on Democrats running to the left of Talarico — including democratic socialist streamer Hasan Piker and Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El Sayed — and perennial adversaries like Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi.
The midterm convention was unique, but Trump’s speech was vintage campaign material. He bragged about the size of his three victories in Texas, falsely claimed he won the 2020 presidential election and spent significant time hitting his signature issues, including the border — long a point of GOP electoral strength in Texas.
Touting the ongoing effort to build a border wall, Trump shouted out Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas’ two senators — including Sen. John Cornyn, whom he’s had a frosty relationship with since endorsing against him in the primary — for helping with the project.
“See, I’m being very nice,” Trump said. “Ted Cruz worked very hard on the wall, and so did John Cornyn. So did John Cornyn. They both did.”
Kayla Guo contributed to this report.
