Melania calls Trump “sir”? President’s ramblings at Texas rally lead to bizarre admission about his 21-year marriage

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President Donald Trump told attendees at a rally in Texas on Wednesday that his wife of 21 years, Melania Trump, addresses him the same way as one of his employees rather than using his name or any other term of endearment.

The president was speaking in support of Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton when he launched into a lengthy speech alleging that Paxton’s opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, was vegan, which Talarico denies.

But he quickly went off on a tangent about the pronunciation of “vegan” and recalled being corrected by his wife.

“You know, my wife said to me, ‘Sir, you have to do me a favor – it’s not vay-gan, it’s vee-gan,” he said.

Talarico, the 37-year-old seminarian who is currently leading Paxton in the latest polls in the Texas Senate race, has repeatedly denied subscribing to a vegan or vegetarian diet — a lifestyle choice that would be politically perilous in a cattle-ranching state like Texas.

But Paxton’s campaign — and Trump’s — have repeatedly asserted that the Democrat refrains from consuming animal products.

The president continued to repeat the slanderous claims about Talarico’s diet, telling the partisan crowd that his claims to a carnivorous lifestyle were fabricated.

“Now he says he likes meat, but he’s vegan – you know, Melania? I get it,” he said.

“He’s a vegan. He wants to eat a piece of lettuce, a small piece of lettuce, please.”

Trump then suggested that Talarico’s recent absence from the campaign trail was due to a gastrointestinal illness brought on by eating meat for political purposes.

“Do you know where he is? He’s sick because he was forced to eat meat for political reasons, and he’s vomiting everywhere. He’s sick,” he said.

He continued his bizarre story, accusing Talarico of “forcing himself to go to barbecues” and “shoving a few short ribs down his throat.”

“But he would eat, and then what would happen? He would go to the back of the tent and throw up everywhere because he didn’t want meat,” Trump claimed.

The meat-based GOP attack on the Texas Democrat stems from comments he made to the Texas Humane Legislation Network in which he said reducing meat consumption was “existential” to combating climate change.

At no time did Talarico claim to abstain from meat himself, but that did not stop Republicans from alleging without evidence that he did not consume it.

For his part, Talarico said he was “eating barbecue long before Ken Paxton’s first indictment,” a reference to the Republican’s long-standing legal troubles.

Trump’s appearance in San Antonio on Wednesday was his fourth trip to the Lone Star State in the past six weeks and comes as Talarico has built a lead over Paxton that, if it holds, could make him the first Democrat to win a statewide election since Ann Richards won the governor’s office 36 years ago, in 1990.

A recent Sienna College poll showed Talarico with a 51 to 45 percent lead over Paxton, while another Fox News poll also showed the Democrat leading Paxton by a 51 to 49 percent margin.

The last Democrat to win a Senate race in Texas was Lloyd Bentsen, who was re-elected to a fourth term in 1988, although he lost at the top of the ticket as the running mate of then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in that year’s presidential race.

Bentsen would resign four years later to become Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration. His appointed Democratic replacement, Robert Krueger, served in the Senate for three months before losing a special election to Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison.