While visiting El Paso shooting victims and the medical staff who treated them on Wednesday, August 8, President Donald Trump took the opportunity to brag about the crowd size of a MAGA rally held in the Texas border town in February and made a dig at former Democratic Texas congressman/current Trump critic Beto O’Rourke.
Video of his speech, shared by local CBS affiliate KDBC, shows Trump speaking to the staff at University Medical Center of El Paso, who have been tending to victims of Saturday’s mass shooting that left 22 people dead and dozens more injured.
After complimenting the hospital employees on their difficult jobs, the president, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, directed the conversation back to his favorite topic: himself.
“I was here three months ago. We made a speech … that place was packed … that was some crowd,” Trump boasted. “We had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto [O’Rourke]. Beto had, like, 400 people in a parking lot. They said ‘his crowd was wonderful.'”
This is viewer video of President @realDonaldTrump and @FLOTUS at @umcelpaso meeting with victims and medical staff. Send us any photos/videos of president Trump’s visit to #ElPaso and we may show it on TV. Upload here: https://t.co/UHa4MdGOH4 pic.twitter.com/DD5otJtYEg
— CBS4Local (@CBS4Local) August 8, 2019
For what it’s worth, O’Rourke’s February counterrally to Trump’s MAGA event drew about 7,000 attendees, which was 500 more than Trump’s crowd, according to the Texas Tribune. But even if Trump’s crowd size were bigger, a hospital visit to see the victims of a mass shooting allegedly perpetrated by a white nationalist who echoed Trump’s racist anti-immigration rhetoric maybe isn’t the right venue in which to bring that up. This would be especially true when, according to The Washington Post, none of the eight shooting victims still hospitalized wanted to meet with the president anyway.
