Donald Trump has been mocked by Chris Christie over the poor turn out at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the weekend.
The annual conservative event this year was witness to guests lobbing a number of casual attacks against transgender Americans, jokes at their expense and even thretening to strip them of their healthcare and remove them from public life.
Former president Trump, in his keynote speech at the event, said the 2024 presidential elections were a “final battle” and that “we no longer have a country” if he lost.
Mr Christie, the one-time president’s former ally, reacted to the event in an interview on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.
“You saw the scenes at CPAC, that room was half full,” said the former New Jersey governor.
“Let’s not pretend that CPAC is CPAC any more, it’s TPAC, okay? It’s Trump PAC. It’s not CPAC any longer and only the most desperate people showed up at CPAC to even speak, other than Trump or people within Trump’s orbit.”
Citing previous examples of smaller crowd sizes at the twice-impeached president’s rallies, Mr Christie said he did not think such rallies “would be nearly as big as they were before”.
The former federal prosecutor pointed to the protest rallies on 20 January 2017, when demonstrators gathered against Mr Trump’s inaugural ceremony, in which more than 200 were injured along with six police officers.
“What got him upset on January 6th? The crowd size. What got him upset on January 20th 2017? The crowd size. He measures that as an example of his own power and own authority, and I don’t think he has it anymore,” Mr Christie said.
“Look, he’s the front-runner, there’s no doubt. He’s, essentially, an incumbent president running for renomination, not re-election,” he said, adding that the former president “is not what he used to be in most respects”.
What could have been a massive “big tent” gathering of DC Republicans and their nationwide grassroots allies instead appeared to be more of a muted affair held to celebrate Mr Trump’s glory and his dominant but still incomplete segment of the Republican Party.
The split was evident in the crowd size at the event on Friday, when many big-name speakers like Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump Jr and others were slated to speak. All of the above spoke to half-empty ballrooms which struggled to reach the same tenor and excitement of the average Trump rally.
The sparse attendance was also mocked on Twitter by the former president’s detractors, including 2020 DNC delegate Victor Shi.
“CPAC should show every Democrat that there are WAY more of us than there are of them. Depressing crowd size; barely anyone showed up to watch Donald Trump Jr and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their base is shrinking fast. Ours is expanding. The numbers are on our side. We can win,” the delegate said.
