Ted Lieu’s Trump ‘high school gym’ dunk backfires spectacularly

BS BULLETIN:

Rep. Ted Lieu mocked President Donald Trump for holding an Ohio campaign rally in a high school gym.
The roughly 4,500-capacity gym filled, with additional supporters lined up outside and onto the football field.
Then X users responded with photos of Lieu speaking before considerably smaller audiences — and his popularity test suddenly became a two-way street.

Rep. Ted Lieu tried to make President Donald Trump’s choice of an Ohio high school gym into a measure of presidential popularity.

Then X applied the same test to Ted Lieu.

@tedlieu You poor bitter phony…. A California eunuch… this you? https://t.co/YX81jNKEOl

— defundthemob (@defundthemob1) October 4, 2026

“Want to know how popular trump is?” the California Democrat posted Saturday. “He’s speaking in a high school gym in Ohio today.”

Trump was in Vandalia campaigning for Republican Sen. Jon Husted and other Ohio GOP candidates at Butler High School.

The venue certainly wasn’t an arena.

There was just one problem with Lieu’s punchline: the roughly 4,500-person gym filled, and supporters who couldn’t immediately get inside were photographed lining up outside the building and onto the football field.

But X wasn’t finished.

Users began responding to Lieu with photos of his own public appearances — including one showing the congressman speaking before a decidedly more intimate gathering.

One response delivered the entire rebuttal in five words: “You can’t fill the staff lounge.”

Another turned Lieu’s own formulation directly back on him: “Want to know how popular Lieu is? He’s not speaking to anyone today because nobody wants to hear him speak.”

And then came perhaps the most economical response of all: “I’m sorry, who are you?”

Lieu’s original point was obvious. Trump holds enormous arena rallies, so speaking inside a high school gym was supposed to demonstrate diminished drawing power.

But using venue size as a popularity test invites an obvious comparison with the person making the argument.

Trump’s Saturday event also wasn’t a presidential campaign rally.

It was a midterm campaign stop aimed at boosting Husted and other Ohio Republicans, including gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Trump carried Ohio in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

None of that establishes Trump’s current national popularity, of course. One packed gym — just like one half-empty room — isn’t an opinion poll.

But Lieu wasn’t citing an opinion poll.

He chose crowd size.

And once he did, the internet went looking for his.

MY QUICK TAKE

There are certain rules of social media that really ought to be printed next to the “Post” button.

Rule No. 1: Before mocking somebody else’s crowd, Google your own.

Lieu could have criticized Trump’s speech. He could have cited polling. He could have made an argument about Ohio, the midterms or Republican enthusiasm.

Instead, he invented the Ted Lieu Crowd Size Index.

Unfortunately for Ted, X has pictures.

And that’s how a tweet intended to make Donald Trump look small ended with people inspecting photographs of Ted Lieu speaking to rooms where everybody could probably split an Uber home.