Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney is mocking GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance over his rally crowd sizes.
Vance, who was announced as the running mate of former President Donald Trump amid last month’s Republican National Convention, held a sparsely attended campaign event in Michigan on Wednesday that instantly prompted ridicule from some on X, formerly Twitter.
Cheney, an outspoken critic of Trump and one of only two Republicans who served on the now-defunct House January 6 Select Committee, joined in the mockery after Vance shared an image of himself and his “entourage” arriving for an additional campaign stop in Wisconsin.
“This Entourage reboot is going to be awesome,” Vance wrote, referring to the HBO series Entourage, while sharing an image of himself and around a dozen other people on a tarmac near Air Force Two, on which Vice President Kamala Harris had arrived around the same time.
“Looks like @JDVance brought all his rally attendees to the airport with him today,” Cheney responded.
Looks like @JDVance brought all his rally attendees to the airport with him today. https://t.co/ZtaeRJfVLM
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) August 7, 2024
Trump/Vance campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded to Cheney’s post in the following statement to Newsweek: “Liz Cheney couldn’t draw a crowd if she wanted to.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, where Cheney serves as professor of practice, via email on Wednesday.
During a campaign event outside the Shelby Township Police Department headquarters in Michigan on Wednesday morning, Vance took aim at Harris over President Joe Biden’s immigration policies and suggested that the vice president is a ” chameleon,” defending Trump’s recent remarks questioning the fact that Harris is Black.
A video of the event shared to X by Michigan political reporter Maggie George suggests that the small number of people attending the Vance speech in support of the candidate was rivaled by the press covering the event.
Ron Filipkowski, a former federal prosecutor and a frequent Trump critic, shared a video showing the difference in crowd size at the Vance event in Michigan and a far larger rally held by Harris and her running mate Tim Walz in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Wednesday.
First half of this clip is Harris’s rally crowd today.
Second half is Vance’s rally crowd today. pic.twitter.com/yySFJBa0qw
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 7, 2024
Vance unsuccessfully attempted to confront Harris after she arrived in Wisconsin around the same time at the same airport, telling reporters that he approached Air Force Two because he “wanted to check out [his] future plane.” He later held a small campaign event at a manufacturing company in Eau Claire.
Harris has recently begun taunting Trump over the size of his rally crowds—a topic that the former president has seemingly been sensitive about in the past, having frequently boasted about his audiences being larger than crowds at many events for President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the presidential race last month.
On Tuesday, the Harris campaign mocked Trump on his own Truth Social platform, pointing out that a Harris/Walz rally in Philadelphia, where the Minnesota governor was introduced as Harris’ running mate, may have had a significantly larger crowd than a Trump event at the same venue two weeks earlier.
“Harris rally vs. @realDonaldTrump rally. Same arena in Philly,” the campaign posted, alongside two photos of Temple University’s Liacouras Center in Philadelphia.
The Harris campaign claimed that there were 14,000 people at the rally and in a nearby overflow room on Tuesday. The venue itself reportedly has the capacity to seat 10,000 people. According to The Daily Pennsylvanian, a June 22 Trump rally at the Liacouras Center drew an audience of “nearly 4,000.”
