Donald Trump thanked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine for attending his speech Wednesday at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, even though neither was there.
Trump, 80, mentioned Hegseth and Caine about a third of the way through his 105-minute speech, in which he said he would give Americans $5,000 each if Republicans held both chambers of Congress in the midterms.
“By the way, I’d like to thank Pete Hegseth, and I’d like to thank—I’d like to thank General Caine. Where is General Caine? I’d like to thank—they’re here someplace. This is a big room. This place is packed,” Trump said.
Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not in the arena. He was about six miles away at a 9/11 anniversary event at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, where he participated in a discussion with former deputy national security adviser J.D. Crouch, an agenda for the occasion noted. Caine’s spokesperson, Joe Holstead, confirmed his appearance to The Washington Post.
The Daily Beast also confirmed through a spokesperson for Caine’s office that he did not attend Trump’s speech.
An F-16 fighter pilot with the D.C. National Guard during the terrorist attacks, Caine, 58, recalled that while tragic, the day was “also filled with beautiful examples of selfless courage, over and over again,” the Post reported.
Meanwhile, Hegseth, 46, was over a thousand miles away in Washington. There, he attended a meeting of the president’s commission on the U.S. Space Force Academy at NASA headquarters, the Defense Department said in a press release.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House, the Pentagon, and Holstead for comment.
In a statement to the Post, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly ignored Trump’s flub, saying he “rightfully thanked General Caine for all he has done to strengthen our military and make our homeland safer.”
Immediately after Trump’s erroneous remark about Hegseth and Caine, he insisted that American Airlines Center was “packed,” and anticipated negative coverage about attendance.
“The fake news will go around and—you see that man up there? He’s leaving for the bathroom. He’ll be back in two minutes. They’ll take a picture of his seat while he’s gone, and they’ll say, ‘Trump did not fill up the arena,’” he said.
But Daily Beast reporters saw not just an empty seat or two, but empty sections.
NBC News also noted that by the 90-minute mark of Trump’s speech, it was clear that “lots of folks have left the arena.”
Likewise, Reuters wrote that “upper decks are empty, large stretches of the side sections remain sparsely filled, and even with Trump onstage the arena is clearly not at capacity.”
