Donald Trump is having trouble selling advance tickets for his upcoming speaking tour with conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly, according to interviews with ticketing officials for the venues.
Politico
I think they mean fake history.
Early last month, Trump and O’Reilly, the one-time top Fox News host, announced a joint “History Tour” featuring four stops in December. O’Reilly said his conversations with Trump “will not be boring,” while the former president promised “fun, fun, fun for everyone who attends.”
Tickets went on sale for the events on June 14. While most seats are priced between $100 and $300, a “VIP Meet & Greet Package” goes for more than $8,500 and includes getting pictures taken with Trump and O’Reilly and a pre-show, 45-minute reception.
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In Orlando, where the duo is hosting an event at the 20,000-capacity Amway Center on Dec. 12, a box office employee for the arena said, “There’s still a lot of tickets open.” The person, who like others for this story insisted on anonymity to share confidential sales data, added: “We have concerts that are doing a lot better than this.” A Bad Bunny concert being held next March recently sold out within two days, for example, and the majority of seats for a Dec. 3 Kane Brown concert have been sold already.
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At the 20,000-seat American Airlines Center in Dallas, home to the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and NHL’s Dallas Stars, a large number of seats remain open for the Dec. 19 Trump-O’Reilly event, according to a stadium employee who works in ticket sales.
For Trump’s Houston event with O’Reilly at the 19,000-seat Toyota Center, home to the NBA’s Houston Rockets, 60 to 65 percent of seats remain unsold, an employee with access to ticket sales information estimated.
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As of Thursday evening, Ticketmaster pages for the Orlando, Dallas and Sunrise events and the Axs page for the Houston event show wide swathes of available seats, with some large sections only having sold a few tickets.
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[F]ormer presidents — and even their spouses — don’t usually encounter hurdles in selling out their appearances and speeches. Tickets for Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” book tour in 2018, for example, sold quickly, with most tickets for her Chicago United Center stop selling out within minutes and the cheapest tickets for all the venues selling out in less than two days. Her average venue size was similar to Trump’s, although Trump’s four venues have a slightly higher capacity.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s joint Live Nation tour in 2018 and 2019, meanwhile, saw events sell out within a week or two weeks, according to a person familiar with that tour, although the venues were smaller than the four Trump events.
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Both Trump and O’Reilly pushed back aggressively at the notion that ticket sales are not robust.
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O’Reilly, in a phone interview after Trump had told him to call this reporter, denied that ticket sales are lagging, calling it “false” and “totally ridiculous” [...]
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O’Reilly threatened to sue this reporter, saying, “You put one word in there that’s not true, I’ll sue your ass off and you can quote me on that. You’re just a hatchet man and that’s what you are.”
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A Trump aide noted that the former president hasn’t promoted the events very much since they went on sale, and said that “many tickets” haven’t yet been made available.
Sure.
“The History Tour has already sold over $5 million of tickets, and the excitement and enthusiasm is unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington said in a statement. “Come December, the sold out shows will be a memorable night for all.”
We'll see. Any bets on whether any of those shows gets cancelled?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
