Trump-O’Reilly event was less than half full despite predictions of a sellout: report

Videos circulating online Sunday suggested that Donald Trump's event with Bill O'Reilly in Orlando came up well short of the sellout crowd that organizers predicted.

Now, there are hard numbers to confirm it.

The Orlando Sentinel reported Thursday that former president Trump and former Fox News host O'Reilly's event at the Amway Center sold 5,406 tickets, according to city records.

"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... despite tickets for those seats being listed as available all the way until Sunday morning," the newspaper reported.

The Amway Center's normal capacity for "an end-stage concert" — which is the setup that Trump and O'Reilly used — is between 12,500 and 17,000, the Sentinel reported. And hundreds of seats were listed as available in the upper bowl on the morning of the event.

"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," according to the newspaper.

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Tickets for the "History Tour" started at $100 for upper deck seats and ran into the thousands of dollars for VIP packages. The VIP packages included “floor seats, a 45-minute reception before the show, and photos with Trump and O’Reilly."

The tour began Saturday in Sunrise, Florida — where the "top bowl" of the FLA Live Arena was also reportedly closed due to an abundance of empty seats. The History Tour concludes this coming weekend with events in Dallas and Houston.

When Politico reported in July that ticket sales for the "History Tour" weren't going well, O'Reilly threatened to sue the site's reporter. Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington told Politico, “Come December, the sold-out shows will be a memorable night for all.”

Aubrey Jewett, a political science at the University of Central Florida, said of Sunday's attendance: “I guess it does show that there’s a limit to his popularity. 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.”