Trump, O’Reilly sold 5,406 tickets for Orlando event
The Donald Trump-Bill O’Reilly “History Tour” just sold 5,406 tickets for Sunday’s event at Amway Center in Orlando, city records show, despite earlier predictions of a sellout by organizers.
The listed capacity for the event of 8,700 didn’t include vast swaths of the upper bowl covered with a tarp before the event started, said Orlando spokeswoman Samantha Holsten, despite tickets for those seats being listed as available all the way until Sunday morning.
In total, records for the city-owned arena show that 6,201 people went through the turnstiles for the two-hour event, in which the former president repeated his usual litany of attacks on Democrats and Republicans alike and spread more falsehoods about the 2020 election.
There was no reason given for the disparity of about 800 people between ticket sales and attendees, although the larger figure might include those who got tickets for free.
Tickets started at $100 and rose into thousands for VIP packages, but were selling for as little as $40 the morning of the event.
“I guess it does show that there’s a limit to his popularity,” Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, said of the former president. “He’s still influential and still popular within the Republican Party. But a lot of his fans apparently were not willing to pay 100 bucks a crack to hear him talk for two hours.”
The modest ticket sales came after a Trump representative threatened a lawsuit against Politico in July for reporting that initial sales for the show were slow. Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington told Politico, “Come December, the sold-out shows will be a memorable night for all.”
Amway Center’s typical listed capacity for an end-stage concert, similar to the stage setup Sunday, is between 12,500 to 17,000.
Hundreds of seats for the Trump event were listed as available in the upper bowl as late as Sunday.
But when doors opened at noon, people who bought tickets to an upper bowl seat, including an Orlando Sentinel reporter, were told they had been upgraded to empty seats in the lower bowl.
The closure of the upper bowl with tarps was similar to what was done at the FLA Live Arena in South Florida the day before. The two Florida events last weekend were the first of four History Tour events, with the third and fourth set for this weekend in Dallas and Houston.
Representatives for Trump and O’Reilly did not return requests for comment Thursday.
The ticketed events are a major change from Trump’s usual free rallies, which he has held as recently as October in Georgia and Iowa.
Trump has been extremely sensitive about crowd counts, dating back to his first day in the White House when Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump’s inauguration, which photos showed to have garnered a smaller crowd than former President Obama’s, was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in-person and around the globe.”
Spicer later said he regretted those comments.
There was controversy surrounding Trump’s previous Amway event in 2019, a free rally kicking off his reelection campaign. The turnstile count was 19,792, almost at capacity. But Trump claimed that “tens of thousands” of people were outside trying to get in.
Yet, as Trump talked, reporters and photographers observed only a few dozen people in the holding area outside to watch him on a large video screen.
At Sunday’s event, an announcer told the crowd close to the official start time of 3 p.m. that “thousands” were still entering the building, despite the crowd in the lower bowl appearing largely as it would when the event began close to 4 p.m.
Other ticketed events in Orlando featuring notable politicians have been held in smaller venues, such as President Biden’s appearance as a former vice president at the 2,731-capacity Walt Disney Theater at the Dr. Phillips Center in 2018.
Jewett said the Trump-O’Reilly team might have been overconfident in booking a large concert arena such as Amway.
“Maybe the pricing was OK because they still sold more than 5,000 tickets,” Jewett said. “But maybe they just overshot the venue.”