Clownish Republican Chris Christie announced his presidential campaign in New Hampshire last night— “positioning himself,” wrote Maeve Reston and Hannah Knowles, “as a bare-knuckled brawler” best-equipped to make the case against Señor Trumpanzee, his onetime ally. They termed him “a long-shot candidate in a growing Republican field,” but he’s a no-shot candidate, hoping to derail Trump and set himself up with whomever wins, presumably DeSantis, for a Cabinet position. “Christie’s backers point to his blunt-talking style and his sharp wit as traits that make him uniquely suited to shake up the race by forcefully challenging Trump in a way that will compel voters to listen. But he is viewed negatively by many Republicans, polls show, underscoring the uphill climb he faces. And many prominent figures in the party who have vocally criticized Trump from a more traditional GOP posture in recent years have been rejected in party primaries.”
He won’t be allowed to participate in the first debate this August because he refuses to pledge to back Trump if he’s the party nominee… but Trump probably won’t be allowed to participate either for the opposite reason… he won’t pledge to back anyone who wins who isn’t named Trump! Other candidates launching this week (today) include Pence and Doug Burgum, the self-funding billionaire governor of North Dakota— and Cornel West (on the People’s Party, which doesn’t have a ballot line in any state).
Reston and Knowles wrote that while touring New Hampshire “Christie has already begun to preview his point-by-point takedown of promises that Trump made and never kept— from his pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare to his promise to build a wall along the entire southern border and make Mexico to pay for it. ‘We’re at a place where we live in one of two worlds, either Trump is going to cruise to the nomination, or someone is going to step up and challenge him,’ said Russ Schriefer, who is advising the super PAC that has formed to support Christie’s bid. ‘You don’t beat a bully by necessarily being nice to the bully. You have to stand up to them; call them out for their lies; be very direct and blunt and get voters to realize that what he’s been selling isn’t true.’ But the Republican electorate has so far shown little yearning for that kind of candidacy.”
Polling shows that Trump crushing the field. The latest Real Clear Politics average of polls is daunting for the anti-Trump candidates:
Señor T: 53.2%
Meatball Ron- 22.4% (and sinking)
Nikki Haley- 4.4%
Pence- 3.8%
Ramaswarmy- 2.6%
Tim Scott- 1.6%
Glenn Youngkin- 1.0%
Chris Sununu- 1.0%
Chris Christie- 1.0%
Larry Elder- 0.5%
Asa Hutchinson- 0.4%
Trump questioned the rationale behind Christie’s candidacy during a recent Fox News town hall in Iowa, pointing to his limited support: “I hear Chris Christie’s coming in,” he said. “What’s the purpose?”
Among the many challenges facing the former New Jersey governor will be to convince GOP voters to trust his instincts after the twists and turns of his complicated history with Trump. Christie formed a close alliance with Trump shortly after dropping out of the 2016 contest. He became one of his closest adviser— leading Trump’s 2016 transition team until he was ousted.
He later oversaw the White House task force on opioid addiction and also prepared Trump for presidential debates by playing Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But Christie said Trump’s false statements about the 2020 election being stolen from him undermined democracy and he publicly rebuked Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, accusing him of inciting the riot in an effort to intimidate Pence and Congress into overturning the election.
“Christie’s biggest challenge is that the more pro-Trump people don’t trust him— because he turned his back on the guy— and the folks who are never-Trump, or Trump skeptics, remember that he was one of his most ardent supporters and defenders,” said Kevin Madden, who was an adviser to Mitt Romney during the 2012 race. “It’s just hard to see who’s the Christie constituency in today’s Republican Party.”
Christie’s unfavorable ratings are some of the highest in the GOP field. In a Marquette Law School national poll released in late May, 18 percent of registered Republican voters said they had a favorable view of Christie, while 40 percent viewed him unfavorably and 42 percent said they had not heard enough about him to say.
While preparing to enter the race, Christie has called Trump “a coward” and “a puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin and taunted Trump for being “afraid” to share the stage with serious people as the former president has entertained the prospect of sitting out the first debate. And he compared Trump to “a child” for refusing to let go of his falsehood that he won the 2020 election.
Christie’s advisers say the former New Jersey governor has internalized the lessons of the 2016 campaign when he and other candidates believed they could wait to attack Trump until the field had winnowed. In a recent New Hampshire appearance, Christie mocked the other contenders for tiptoeing around Trump with veiled criticisms: “He’s [Lord] Voldemort in the Harry Potter books— he who shall not be named.”
“You’re not going to beat someone by closing your eyes, clicking your heels together three times,” Christie told voters in New Hampshire. “In American politics, if you want to beat somebody, you’ve got to go get them.”
DeSantis has taken a far more aggressive posture toward Trump since recently announcing his candidacy, in some ways trying to position himself to the right of Trump. Christie hails from a different wing of the party, once drawing national attention for his ability to win and hold the governorship in a blue state.
The former federal prosecutor— who showed his own debating skills with his takedown of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio during one 2016 faceoff— is also eager to face Trump on the debate stage. He will have a short runway to meet the criteria set by the Republican National Committee to qualify: drawing 40,000 individual campaign donors and the support of at least 1 percent of voters in multiple polls.
…Christie bet heavily on a strong performance in New Hampshire and had a defining moment at a debate there, ridiculing Rubio’s talking points as “the memorized 25-second speech.” But he finished sixth in New Hampshire’s primary days later, soon suspended his campaign and threw his support behind Trump, becoming one of the first prominent Republicans to endorse him.
“He is rewriting the playbook of American politics because he is providing strong leadership that is not dependent upon the status quo,” Christie said of Trump at the time.
After he was hospitalized with covid-19 in the fall of 2020, Christie urged Trump to encourage Americans to wear face masks and said he was “wrong” not to use one at a White House event where many attendees contracted the virus. Christie eventually wrote in a memoir that Trump called him to ask whether the ex-governor would blame him for the infection.
Yesterday, Politico Magazine published an amusing piece, 55 Things You Need to Know About Chris Christie. And the introduction had the most relevant “thing.” Michael Kruse and Ekatrerina Pechenkina wrote “He was Trump before Trump. He was DeSantis before DeSantis. Pugnacious, unapologetic and politically incorrect, he was before ‘Bridgegate’ a total ‘rock star.’… Now he barely registers in poll, running behind Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswarmy and level with two current governors who aren’t even running.” They also mentioned in the intro that he’s “addicted to attention,” which explains why he’s bothering to run a race he has zero chance of winning. As for the 55 things, I read them all; you can too, but these are the ones I thought worth rehashing:
As someone writing a memoir, I can say that #2 sounds pretty sad and off-base: “I have regrets about every part of my life, Mark,” Christie told Mark Leibovich earlier this year. “And anybody who says they don’t is lying.”
I was freshman class president. That sured me of ever wanting to run for elective office again, although in my senior year I ran for an at large Senate seat in a huge field of candidates and came in first. That was satisfying but I don’t recall ever going to a Senate meeting. Christie has a different perspective. #11- He was the president of his class every year of high school. #14- He was rejected from Georgetown and instead went to the University of Delaware, where he voted for the first time, for Ronald Reagan, in 1980, became president of his dorm and of the student body and organized student opposition to Reagan’s cuts to student loans by traveling to Washington and personally lobbying (then-second-term-senator and fellow Fightin’ Blue Hen) Joe Biden.
#18- Christie and Mrs DeSantis (AKA- the Mafia Princess) will have plenty to talk about: “Christie’s aunt’s husband’s brother was a ranking member of the Genovese crime family —twice convicted of racketeering, sentenced to 25 years in prison and linked by investigators to several murders, including one in which the victim was strangled with piano wire. Christie visited him in prison in 1991.”
#19- “In his first four years in politics, from ’93 to ’97, pro-choice and anti-gun, he challenged an 18-year Republican incumbent in the state senate in a bid that ended almost before it began because of invalid signatures he collected to get on the ballot, ran to be a Morris County freeholder (essentially a county commissioner) and won even though he was sued successfully for defamation for an attack ad, started running again for the state legislature mere weeks after his swearing in and lost badly in his first freeholder reelection effort. ‘His reach exceeded his grasp,’ a longtime GOP pol would tell Ryan Lizza.”
#21- “He was rewarded by Bush with a nomination to be the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey— despite no criminal or prosecutorial experience as a lawyer. In seven years, he oversaw the indictments and guilty pleas of more than 130 elected and appointed political officials— with not one acquittal. He also successfully prosecuted Jared Kushner’s father. ‘He was a very quick study,’ said one of his deputies.”
#30- In 2013, he got a standing ovation from the Democratic legislature at his state of the state address, had Lap-Band surgery to try to lose weight, earned a spot on TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, signed legislation supporting financial aid and in-state college tuition for undocumented immigrants, signed legislation banning licensed therapists from trying to turn gay teens straight and earned a second term in a landslide. Nearly a decade before DeSantis was reelected by 19 points in swing-state Florida, Christie was reelected by 22 in blue-state New Jersey— winning women, Hispanics and independents. He won nearly half of the state’s voters aged 18 to 29. He won nearly a third of its liberals and Democrats. He won more than a fifth of its Black voters. He won all but two of New Jersey’s 21 counties. ‘Politics is a feeling,’ Christie told Peggy Noonan in October 2013— and the feeling at the time was that Christie was maybe going to be the next pres35ident.”
#32- His favorite book is The Great Gatsby. He says he’s read it twice. Favorite movie? The Godfather. His favorite baseball team is the Mets. His favorite football team is the Dallas Cowboys. He’s a Bruce Springsteen fanatic. He’s been to more than 140 concerts. He knows every word of every song. When Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist for Springsteen’s E Street Band, died in 2011, Christie told his wife, ‘My youth is over. He’s dead, and anything that is left of me being young is over.’”
#43- He also registered as a lobbyist in 2020 to represent businesses lining up for Covid relief funds.
#49- And DeSantis? “I don’t think Ron DeSantis is a conservative,” Christie said.
Christie went right after Trump and his crime family: “The person I am talking about, who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault, who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong— but finds every reason to take credit for anything that goes right— is Donald Trump. A lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog is not a leader. [Trump] made us smaller by dividing us even further and pitting us one against the other… There’s a big argument in our country right now about whether character matters, and we have leaders who have shown us over and over again that not only are they devoid of character, they don’t care. We can’t dismiss the question of character anymore, everybody. If we do, we get what we deserve, and we will have to own it… Let me tell you something, everybody. The grift from this is breathtaking. It’s breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis? Two billion dollars from the Saudis. You think it’s ’cause some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the president of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis?”
Trump's response was to share an edited video (above) on his pretend-Twitter site that made it look like Christie gave his announcement speech at a buffet and that he was holding a plate piled with food.
no he won't be elected. but that's not the goal. he'll be on all the medias and will be anti-trump. so if trump dies or meathead wins (election or insurrection), he'll be in line for a national posting to something... as high maybe as vice chancellor/fuhrer.
he's been a political chameleon. americans are plenty gullible enough to continue to fall for his many colors. he has this in his favor.
he's correct about meathead. he's no conservative. he's a nazi. he's the naziest of all the nazis.