MS NOW's Joe Scarborough threw some shade at JD Vance for his sparsely attended speech in Georgia on Tuesday.
The Turning Point USA event in Athens was free but still only drew a couple thousand attendees, footage flashed by the Morning Joe team on Wednesday showed.
'Wait, hold on a second. Is that a- is that a Falcons football game? Can we see that? Can we see those seats again?' Scarborough joked of the noticeably vacant Akins Ford Arena, which has a capacity of 8,500.
'Whoa,' the Georgia-born host gasped.
Cohost Jonathan Lemire continued the riff by saying, 'Yeah. The smallest crowd in Atlanta since...'
'...since the last time the Falcons played,' Scarborough said, finishing the sentence. 'And I'm a huge Falcons fan.'
'But this is Boring Point USA. Like that... That's not good,' he added.
The two also took issue with the vice president using the spot to warn Pope Leo XIV 'to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.' The pontiff has been subject to repeated attacks from Donald Trump in recent days.
'Wait, hold on a second. Is that a- is that a Falcons football game? Can we see that? Can we see those seats again?' Joe Scarborough, a Georgia native, joked after seeing noticeably vacant Akins Ford Arena during JD Vance's appearance at a Turning Point USA event on Tuesday
Despite the event being free, the vice president only drew a couple thousand attendees
'His concern is not geopolitics. His concern is not the fighting,' Scarborough said, following Pope Leo's multiple general pleas for peace amid the Iran war.
'He is concerned, Jonathan Lemire, with the teachings of Jesus Christ.'
Scarborough called Vance's remarks 'utterly bizarre'. He highlighted how a 41-year-old Catholic convert was advising the leader of the entire religion. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. The vice president sees himself as deeply religious, he has said.
'People will look back one day and laugh, when they have the safety of distance, and laugh that you actually have a vice president sitting on stage warning the pope, God's representative here on Earth for the Catholic Church... on what he can and cannot say about theology - that he "needs to be careful."
'Well, let me tell you something,' Scarborough continued. 'I never hear those warnings when he's talking about abortion. I never hear those warnings when he's talking about traditional marriage.
'I don't hear those warnings when those warnings align with his political views.
'But there's a war that, let us just say, started with the killing of over 150 young girls at a school that the United States lied about initially.'
Scarborough sarcastically asked, 'Is the pope going to get involved in that?'
The stadium's full capacity is roughly 8,500, leaving some gaps in the Athens auditorium
'Does the pope think that Jesus Christ cares?' Scarborough continued.
He joked that Vance had essentially become 'a Catholic last week'.
'And then lecturing the pope, I've got to say, that's like an all-timer.'
He predicted: 'People are going to look back and they're going to have a big chuckle that anybody was ever that arrogant in that position.'
Lemire agreed.
'Yeah, the history books, I often wonder 20, 30, 40 years from now just exactly what they'll say. This will deserve perhaps its own chapter,' he said.
'There's a short list of people who probably can weigh in on matters of theology. I think the pope is probably on that list.'
Pope Leo - the first US-born pontiff - responded to Trump's remarks during the first day of his trip to Africa on Monday, telling reporters he had 'no fear of the Trump administration'.