Trump’s Endorsement of Ken Paxton Goes Hilariously Wrong

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Bullwork Takes. This is a very fun and funny sequence of events that has happened here. So, I needed to discuss it with Joe Pertakone, who was my fashion guru, my fashion maven. I'm going to, I hopefully he doesn't have any bad things to say about my fit after this. But when I saw that Donald Trump was making fun of Ken Paxton's appearance, I had to get Joe on and he's got a great theory here. But first, let's talk about what's going on here. Joe, what did Donald Trump have to say about the appearance of our Republican Texas Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, and his distaste for it? So, first of all, I love the Bullwork hat. You can get him at the Bullwork shop for anyone watching who wants one. What Trump said about Ken Paxton was that he started talking about him. He's saying we need to make this guy the next senator. He was a great defender of all things Trump. He looks pretty bad like he dresses horribly and then he just kept bringing it up repeatedly on separate occasions. And he always does the thing where he says some people say which is code for I am saying. So, I think we have some clips. We have a guy named Ken Paxton and some people don't like the way he dresses or some people don't like the way he interviews or talks. We'll be obviously Ken Paxton. We got to get him a like that. He's a good man. You know, I know very well. He really was a great attorney general and some people I'll be honest. Some people don't like an interview that he'll do or something, you know. So, Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses. And I say this, it's so insulting to him, but I might as well say it. You might not like the way he looks. You might not love his look. You might not love his television interviews, but he was the best attorney general in the country, perhaps. He was one of the best in the entire country. And that speaks a lot louder than the suit he's wearing that doesn't look so great. Joe, the thing here that jumps out is that this is Donald Trump's obsession with television and image and appearance. Like this is the defining characteristic of everything he thinks about, right? This is this is perfect like Trump in a nutshell, is him just being like this guy is like my one of my top allies. I really want him in the Senate, but I hate the way he looks. I hate his clothes. And he can't he can't contain himself from bringing it up every time he mentions Ken Paxton because he's like, I got to advocate advocate for this guy, but I can't stand his look because he likes everyone to look certain way. Remember, he bought shoes for all the cabinet members because he didn't like their shoes. And so like, this is just so funny because it's so classic Trump. The shoes thing is very funny because we have we have a photo of perhaps one of the things that Trump was reacting to. Joe, can I get you to break this down for me? Can we just start with what let's start at the top and work our way down because I feel like there's all sorts of different things going on with this Ken Paxton fit. So he's got the four seasons dry fit golf polo on untucked, which many men wear golf polos casually. That's normal, but you know, untucked and then clearly probably needed an undershirt. And then he's got the, you know, slim ill-fitting pants, a large object in the pocket. We'll get to that later when I go conspiracy mode. And then the shoes which he is he's not such a bob his feet are not that big. They're clearly not his shoes. It reminded me of when you're a little kid and your dad says, take out the garbage. And so you grab the garbage and you go to the door and there's only one pair of shoes and it's your dad's. So you stick your little feet into these giant shoes as you walk out to the garbage cans. That's what it looks like. It looks like he just stepped into someone clear like and Ken Paxton's tall guy. So like, whose shoes are these? Those are shack size shoes. I mean, they're enormous. The undershirt thing is interesting here because we have previous examples of Trump being horrified by somebody's appearance male appearance up there, right? Yeah. So quite a long time ago before he was, you know, even running for president, former Congressman Barney Frank from Massachusetts who passed away recently. He was on the floor and his arm was in a sling, the house floor and his arm was in a sling and he was wearing a sweater, which it's very cold on the house floor as someone who spends a lot of time in the house chamber. It's very cold in there. So you could see his, as Trump said, his nipples protruding, which Trump also described as very, very disrespectful. And so that's something he notices, which if you look at the Ken Paxton photo, you can tell that Trump probably noticed that again too, which very, very disrespectful in the president's own words. So that's probably another thing that added to it that's something we've seen Trump doesn't like. You know, like again, there's this element of Trump where style and surface really does Trump almost no pun intended does Trump everything else. You know, he gets along famously, for example, with Zoran Mamdani. And to the extent that he was basically aping Zoran's fit, right? After he did that first initial oval office meeting with Mamdani, where he was just fawning over him. And then it was like, I think a week later, Mamdani was doing the, you know, sweater with blazer or combo. And then Trump just appeared wearing basically the same thing, which, you know, maybe he took cues from it, but it's just very funny the way like he, he loves style and look. And that's, you know, the things that he's loved about certain generals is that they're straight out of central casting. Like he wants a general from a Tom Clancy movie. He doesn't want, you know, a normal guy who might be brilliant or might have, you know, had this decorated record. He wants, you know, the tough Sam the Eagle character as, you know, a top military advisor. All right. So let's get to your conspiracy theory here, because we've got the, we've got the whole Jim Garrison back into the right thing going on here. And I think you're right. I actually think when you were breaking it down for me, I was like, this is the most plausible explanation for how Ken Paxton ended up looking like this on a campaign event. What, what was the deal here? So I don't have evidence for this other than what we can see in the photo. No evidence. Just visual, visual, you know, your own perception here. If I can put my tinfoil hat on, we can start with the polo. It's a golf polo. Like I said, lots of men wear dry fake golf polo's casually. The fact that it's untucked, you know, maybe, maybe he was playing golf beforehand. And maybe you say, oh, that's a stretch because, you know, lots of people are polos. The shoes. This has happened to me. I've gone and played golf. You leave home in your spikes, and you don't bring, bring a pair of shoes to change it. He can't show up to this campaign event wearing golf spikes. That'd be even worse. So he says, I need somebody else's shoes, but he's a tall guy. So maybe only one staffer who's like six, five or something, he says, you can fit into mine. And so that's why he's wearing size 14s. So that's another part of the theory. Then if you look in his right pocket, what does that look like? Looks like a golf ball, which means when he shanks one and goes, oh, no, I need to read hit, takes it out of the pocket, drops it down. We've all done it. I have this deep theory that Paxton, who is very much being seen as a lazy campaigner fourth of July, he was not doing these big events. He was traveling to Iceland and the UK with his mistress and he's not really engaged politically. So maybe he was playing some golf and then quickly was like, oh, no, I got to go do this event. And he didn't bring a change of clothes. He didn't even bring pairs shoes to change into. And then he probably moves so quickly that he didn't ditch the ball and possibly tease possibly a mini pencil that are in that pocket. Just just a theory. I think look, I think this theory is a very, a very sound one. If we could ever get him on the show, I'm sure we could ask him and figure out which golf course in the San Antonio area he was at that that morning. But it seems like it seems like a pretty good call to me. The other thing that's just funny about this whole fit is that he looks like normal. Let's just say middle-aged man, casual, whatever. He's also wearing a $40,000 watch, which a lot of people jumped on at the time. And I will say it's not even the cost of the watch so much is that it's just kind of. Derek? It's an Uploah, which like in the realm of a world where $40,000 watches exist and that's a justified price. That is a universe that exists that I don't think either of us live in. But it is real. If you are a massive sports star or an actor or a gazillionaire, like people do have those kind of expensive watches. This type of watch, and I know JVL mentioned it on a previous podcast, but this is the kind of watch that like if you are a massive soccer star and you have a ton of money and they say you want this watch, this is the coolest one. It's that kind of watch. It's not like having one of these more understated, but then they're expensive because they're so mechanically complex on the internet. It's a pretty basic watch, but it's a big ugly hunk of gold, and it says like "FU, I'm the richest person in the room." That strategy of politics has worked very well for Trump. It has not worked for other very wealthy politicians who try to downplay their wealth. I keep an eye out on fancy watches in the capital among our elected officials. One fancy watchware is Mark Kelly. but this isn't like, he's not wearing like a super rich guy watch, he wears a brightling and he used to do promotions for brightling because they're suitable to wear in space. Well, let's just say he's got space watches. Yeah, that's a whole different. Yeah, and they're like pilots watches and so for him, it's like a technical thing and to be clear, it's not a solid gold $40,000 watch, but they are expensive in terms of, you know, versus a Casio. In the case of Ken Backston, like, this is a very garish, luxurious, but not too mechanically complex watch, which is just like pure FU money, which if that even like reaches one person that understands that world of things, which is, you know, a lot of weirdos like me who do, they can go, oh, this man, this guy's out of touch. I think that's a safe bet. The other thing, the funny thing just watching that video clip is he is so low energy. He's like, we're gonna go out there, we're gonna win this thing. Cause he just played 18 holes. He's exhausted. He's exhausted. He may have, you know, you never know. He's out on a golf course. What do folks do on golf courses? You get a transfusion, you, you know, sitting the beating son. Yeah, stop by the, stop by the bar cart. You know, it's a, it's a fun time. It's fun time at the, at the golf course. Everybody, everybody has a good time playing golf in Texas in August is probably pretty draining. Yeah. Well, this would, this would be my only pushback on, on the, the theory is that I would assume he would be in shorts, but maybe not. Maybe that's, maybe, maybe he's on a course that requires pants. So I never, you never know. We'll really know when he um, if he emerges like in a week's time, wearing like a perfectly fitting everything that his team says, you're, you're upsetting the president, you need to change. Well, except for the floor shine shoes, which will be one half size two big probably that the president will send him as he sends, as he sends all of his sick of hands. One size two big would be, you know, that feel a lot better than five sizes too big. So I guess good for him. Uh, that's probably, that's probably true. Joe, thank you for uh, for filling us in here. This is, this is great. 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