Donald Trump Jr. Mocked For Speaking At Mostly-Empty Kentucky Rally
Donald Trump Jr. is getting mocked on Twitter for speaking to a mostly-empty stadium at a rally for Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, HuffPost reports.
Bevin is running in a tight re-election race against Democratic challenger Andy Beshear, the state’s Attorney General. Bevin’s team had hoped that bringing in someone with a connection to the Trump family would help bolster his support. And so it was that Trump Jr. was invited to a Bevin rally in Pikeville. As WYMT reported before the event, townsfolk in the Eastern Kentucky community were expecting a “memorable” rally.
Local political science professor Nancy Cade said that the college town of a few thousand people was gearing up for the visit.
“They’re kind of pulling out all the stops to show that Eastern Kentucky matters,” she said.
It was memorable, if for all the wrong reasons. Pikeville’s Appalachian Wireless Arena holds about 7,000 people. A couple hundred showed up.
Photos from the event, which can be seen below, show that the arena had put up black curtains to block out all but a few rows of seats closest to the floor, lest the thousands of empty seats be visible. Even so, most of those seats were empty as well. On the floor, a few dozen people could be seen standing near the stage.
It’s gonna be lit when Don Jr claims there were thousands of people lined up outside for this event https://t.co/nLjbNd0bpf
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 29, 2019
This is the paltry crowd Don Jr. was able to muster in rural East Kentucky tonight. Sad!
via: @RylandKY at Kentucky Public Radio pic.twitter.com/AFXODbLhLO
— Matt Rogers (@Politidope) August 30, 2019
One Twitter user had a laugh at Trump Jr.’s expense.
“I could fit this Don Jr rally in my house and not violate fire code,” he or she wrote.
As it turns out, the thin crowd at the rally may have had less to do with Trump Jr. being there than it had to do with Matt Bevin. Cade suggested as much before the rally.
“Right now, Gov. Bevin is ranked as the least popular governor in his own state,” she said.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Twitter user Zach Hudson.
“Either Don Jr. isn’t a draw, or people really hate America’s most unpopular Gov.”
Donald Trump Jr. and his father often tout the sizes of their crowds, and indeed, on at least one occasion, Trump Jr. inaccurately described the crowd size at a Democratic candidate’s rally. For example, back in February, Trump Jr. tweeted that “only a few hundred people” turned up at a Beto O’Rourke rally in El Paso. Politifact deemed that claim, also made by Donald Trump himself, as “False,” saying that several times that purported number were there, meaning that the attendance at O’Rourke’s rally was easily into the thousands.
