President Trump held a rally in San Antonio, Texas, Wednesday night to help out the Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, whose race has gone wobbly with less than a month to go before the midterm elections.
Mr. Trump was in fighting form, tossing out red meat reminders to Texans about why they voted for him in 2024. He was interrupted nearly a dozen times by protesters, several of whom were led out in handcuffs. He talked a lot about the border, and Democrats, and himself.
What he didn’t talk a lot about was Ken Paxton.
Mr. Trump called the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general one of the best in the country and brought him up onstage briefly, but that was about it. When Mr. Trump first came onstage, it wasn’t even Mr. Paxton who introduced him. It was the baseball player Roger Clemens.
In San Antonio, Mr. Trump wasn’t trying to get people excited about Ken Paxton so much as he was trying to get them excited about Donald Trump. The question animating this race, and so many of the others this season: Is that still enough for Republicans to win these days?
This was Mr. Trump’s third trip to Texas in a month, which is a strong indicator of just how concerned the party is about what could happen here in November. The stakes of this race are especially high for the president, as he endorsed this especially flawed candidate, and cast out Mr. Paxton’s opponent in the primaries, Senator John Cornyn. This is what the MAGA base wanted.
The president had his base laughing and roaring and practically jumping in their seats on Wednesday. He told a long story about another baseball player, Pete Rose, and announced that Mr. Clemens was getting the Medal of Honor. He made jokes about his hair, and Melania.
He played footage of undocumented migrants streaming over the border before he got back into office. He said the word “transgender” a lot. He echoed an assertion he made on Monday on Iran taking out Los Angeles or San Diego, adding: “We protect our cities, we protect our country.” He played video clips of CNN’s data guru, Harry Enten, talking about rock-solid poll numbers among the “MAGA base.” When Mr. Enten said the words “Donald John Trump,” the crowd went wild.
The president laid into Mr. Paxton’s Democratic opponent, James Talarico. “A vote for Talafreako,” Mr. Trump said, “is a vote to turn Texas into a dirty, failing, crime-ridden, third-world dumping ground, and a vote for Ken Paxton is a vote to save Texas and defend everything that make Texas great and makes America great.”
Still, Mr. Paxton may be a tough sell to a wider electorate, as even Mr. Trump has seemed to acknowledge. Here are some of the ways he has described the candidate in recent weeks:
“Some may not like the way he dresses. I don’t.”
“They may not like the way he talks. I can see that.”
“You may not like the way he looks.”
“He could be a pain in the ass sometimes. I’ll be honest.”
Interesting sales pitch, no?
“Look, we’re voting for him, let’s just put it that way,” said Julie Funk, a 66-year-old retired first-grade teacher from nearby Bulverde, Texas. She was there with a few of her girlfriends, all of whom winced at the mention of Mr. Paxton.
“I absolutely agree with all of” the president’s characterizations, Ms. Funk said.
Conversations with likely voters were a tad awkward, since all of them seemed to have heard the president describe their Senate candidate as a pain who looks bad, dresses bad and talks bad. Some tried looking on the bright side.
“He probably already has changed some of that,” a 73-year-old former agriculture worker named Jody Gatto said of Mr. Paxton. “The way he dresses, he definitely has sharpened it up a little bit. Yeah. But you know what? He is what he is.”
Mr. Trump is “just trying to egg him on a little bit,” figured Greg Gill, a 64-year-old I.T. equipment salesman. “Just trying to poke him a little bit, poke him, poke him. You know, fire him up, so he comes out of the corner a little bit, with a little bit of feistiness.”
Others seemed a little sensitive on Mr. Paxton’s behalf.
“I actually have been with him in person, and I’ve gone door-knocking with him, and he dressed really nice that day,” said Mary Wilson, a 67-year-old woman from New Braunfels who works as a volunteer for her county’s Republican Party. She said she handles their social media.
“He doesn’t look funny,” she protested, “and he speaks very well, and he presents himself very well. I took a million photos of him, and I don’t think he looks funny, or dresses funny.”
So then why does Mr. Trump keep trashing Mr. Paxton’s appearance?
“I think Trump just has a quirky personality, and he has reasons that he says things,” she said.
Out in the hall, a 70-year-old nurse from San Antonio, Debra Carlson, was waiting in the concession line. Asked why she thought Mr. Trump was talking about her Senate candidate that way, she just started cracking up and shrugged.
“It’s so funny,” she said, “but Trump has a lot of opinions, doesn’t he?”
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