President Donald Trump raised a piece of meat that did not exist to his mouth, bit down on it and let out two sounds that the internet seized on hours later.
Trump spent much of a roughly 77-minute speech at the Port of Corpus Christi on Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, mocking James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections. He was campaigning for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee.
A Phantom Bite and a Nickname
Talarico had been off the campaign trail for nine days after saying he had the flu, and Trump offered the crowd a different explanation. “I happen to think he was food poisoned by meat because he can’t stand it,” Trump said.
“You ever see him go to a barbecue and he’s trying to show, ‘I love the meat, ah, I love it, look, look,’ and then you see him, where is he? He’s behind the tent, puking,” he continued. Trump lifted an invisible piece of meat to his mouth, stretched out a long vowel, took a second phantom bite and finished with an even odder sound.
Without evidence, Trump floated mental illness as a possible explanation for his opponent’s time away, and he called him “Tala-Freak-O.” He paused the speech to play a video compilation of Talarico talking about trans people, then told the crowd that if the Democrat wins, Texans lose their guns, their oil and their meat.
Talarico said during a virtual appearance on Sept. 30 that he had felt increasingly unwell and had gone to urgent care in Dallas, and that he wanted to avoid passing anything to other people. He canceled some appearances in early October and moved one event online, and his campaign later said he was fighting the flu. A claim circulating in conservative corners of the internet held that he was being treated for a stress-induced episode; both the campaign and a mental health center knocked it down.
Trump’s vegan claim about Talarico, which he has repeated often, is false. Talarico is neither vegan nor vegetarian. The attack grew out of 2022 comments in which he talked about reducing meat consumption and said his Texas House reelection campaign was buying only vegan products from local businesses. His campaign rejected the label outright and circulated photographs of him eating chicken, steak and a turkey leg.
“I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment,” Talarico said in May, a reference to the three felony counts in a fraud case that opened a long run of scandals around the attorney general. Trump also claimed that First Lady Melania Trump once corrected his pronunciation of “vegan.”
The Clip the DNC Grabbed
The clip went viral fast. The Democrats’ account on X posted it, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) grabbed a still of the gesture. George Conway, the conservative attorney and persistent Trump critic, posted a one-line reaction that linked the moment to Trump’s earlier remarks about men’s backsides.
Journalist Aaron Rupar posted a supercut of the speech on X with the text: “Trump speaks to small Corpus Christi crowd, repeatedly glitches and makes strange noises during speech where he also slurred heavily while his dentures seemed to be falling out.”
The riff landed in a stretch of increasingly unfiltered rally material. Trump has waved off Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, with a gagging noise rather than her name. He has talked more than once about the rear end of Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio. He complimented the backside of rapper Nicki Minaj after she spoke at one of his rallies.
A Little Ship From Venezuela
Trump opened the rally by pointing to a ship docked at the port. “I’m thrilled to be here at the Port of Corpus Christi. And one of the many reasons we did it here, we have a little breaking news. You have a little ship. See that little ship out there?” he said. “It’s got 1 million barrels of oil on it from Venezuela.”
He suggested renaming the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait,” and he told the crowd the port “just had its 9 busiest months in history.” On Middle East oil, he said: “Your price is going to come down, but your country’s making a fortune, and that’s really good, right?” The war in Iran is approaching eight months.
The Corpus Christi event was one of back-to-back rallies Trump held that day, the other in Lubbock. A volunteer said about 2,000 tickets were distributed. “I’ve done 26 of them and every one of them is packed like this,” Trump told the crowd.
Former Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel and Danny Amendola joined Trump onstage. Todd Hunter, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Mayes Middleton, Dan Patrick and Paxton spoke before him. Paxton, onstage with the president, said he has “never seen anyone work harder.”
Trump then announced more Federal Emergency Management Agency relief money for this year’s floods in the Texas Hill Country, which Paxton and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had requested. He told the crowd everyone would receive $5,000, but only if Republicans hold the House and the Senate. The rally was his third trip to Texas in a month, in a race where Democrats are chasing a first statewide win in more than three decades.
A Republican Ex-Justice Backs Talarico
Tom Phillips, chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1988 to 2004 and a lifelong Republican, endorsed Talarico in an op-ed on Monday, Oct. 26, the day before the rally. He wrote that Paxton’s reputation would embarrass the state no matter how he behaved in office.
Phillips disagrees with some of Talarico’s positions, but he is confident the Democrat would represent Texas honorably. In the statewide judicial races, he is sticking with Republicans.