Remember Chris Christie? He thinks you do. He even thinks you want to. Christie spoke in New Hampshire on Monday, and you know what that means. The former New Jersey governor thinks he will be the one Republican presidential hopeful to take down Donald Trump in 2024 and ride to the White House in a blaze of glory (if not on a milk-white steed, as finding one that could hold him would be nigh impossible), amid hosannas from a grateful nation that is finally saved as Christie slays the twin dragons of America-First Trumpism and Old Joe Biden’s America-Last socialist internationalism. If you doubt that this is going to happen, that’s only because it isn’t, but nonetheless, up in the Granite State on Monday, Christie was really throwing his weight around.
Christie based his claim that he could beat Trump on the one successful moment of his brief and disastrous 2016 presidential campaign, when he humiliated and mocked Marco Rubio for repeating some campaign patter he had memorized. As a flustered Rubio struggled to get his bearings and kept repeating the same words, Christie taunted him, saying: “There it is — the memorized 25-second speech.”
This nasty exchange, in which Christie appeared more as a bully than as anything else, was supposed to give us the idea that it was wrong for presidential candidates to have memorized any statements (why?) and that Christie himself was a plain-spoken straight shooter who never, ever doled out any canned answers himself (unlikely). Rubio did indeed come off as stiff, unnatural, and overly reliant upon his prepared material rather than daring to think on his feet, but Christie is kidding himself if he thinks the incident made him look statesmanlike or presidential. It was no coincidence that his purposeless, passionless, aimless and self-serving presidential campaign ended a week later.
Nowadays, however, Christie thinks that berating and ridiculing Marco Rubio seven years ago shows that he has what it takes. On Monday, he declared: “You better have somebody on that stage who can do to [Trump] what I did to Marco, because that’s the only thing that’s going to defeat Donald Trump And that means you have to be fearless, because he will come back and right at you.” He apparently did not remind the audience that Trump was among the candidates also in 2016, and Christie didn’t ever seize the opportunity do to him what he did to Rubio.
Christie boasted that Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Pence didn’t have the guts to stand up to Trump and added ominously: “Because it’s not going to end nicely, no matter what. His end will not be a calm and quiet conclusion.” That may be, but the real problem with the idea of a Chris Christie candidacy in 2024 is that it is an open question whether or not he has the backbone to stand up not to Donald Trump but to the Leftist authoritarians who are entrenched in Washington. Christie has never shown up to now that he has either the interest or the ability to do so.
Related: Chris Christie Puts Final Nail in the Coffin of His Political Career
After all, Christie used to back Trump, but then he was supposedly horrified by the bogus Jan. 6 “insurrection.” In Feb. 2022, Christie said: “January 6 was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week: overturn the election. He wanted the election to be overturned.” This was just feeding the Left’s mythology of a mob of violent, crazed MAGA protestors, stirred into a frenzy by Trump, storming the Capitol.
In real life, of course, Trump told the protestors to proceed “peacefully and patriotically,” and we now know from the revealing footage that Tucker Carlson recently released that the whole thing was a hoax: the Capitol Police let the alleged “insurrectionists” into the building, and they walked around snapping selfies and had no idea that they were trying to overthrow the government until Democrats began insisting that they had and throwing them into prison.
Chris Christie has not retracted his endorsement of the Jan. 6 Big Lie. In playing along with the Left’s propaganda in this way, Christie shows that he does not have either the will or the wit to stand up to the Swamp and restore genuinely representative government in Washington. He very likely will be rude to Donald Trump and berate him on the debate stage. But that won’t prove a single thing about who ought to be occupying the Oval Office.
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