Chris Christie Takes Direct Aim at Donald Trump - Rob Horowitz

Chris Christie Takes Direct Aim at Donald Trump - Rob Horowitz

If someone other than Donald Trump ends up winning the Republican nomination, political analysts may look back on the day Chris Christie entered the 2024 presidential race as a pivotal moment.  There could be much talk about the so-called “Chris Christie effect.”  And in all likelihood, it won’t be because the former New Jersey governor emerged as the nominee.

 

This is because Chris Christie--unlike all the other Republican candidates, with the exception of the low-wattage Asa Hutchinson--is taking direct aim at Donald Trump, making the arguments against the former president in public that most other Republican leaders will only whisper in private. In doing so, Mr.  Christie is using his formidable communications and prosecutorial skills to put forward a cogent case, incorporating media-friendly sharp soundbites, and ensuring wide coverage despite the long odds his candidacy faces.

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In a series of television appearances, including ones on Fox News shows that reach large numbers of conservatives and Republican primary voters, Christie has hit Trump for leading the Republican party to 3 straight electoral defeats, for not delivering on his campaign promises, and for the reckless and cavalier treatment of sensitive government documents detailed in the federal indictment of the former president. 

 

Mr. Christie’s attacks are tied together by a consistent thread: Donald Trump has demonstrated that he does not have the character needed in one who occupies the oval office.  As the former NJ governor, who served as a close advisor to the former president, puts it, Mr. Trump is an “angry and vengeful man” who acts like “a petulant child, if you disagree with him.”  In an example of his facility with soundbites, Chris Christie told Brett Baier on Special Report, a highly rated Fox News program, “The minute you speak out against him … he lashes back out like a child. And if you or I were raising that child, we'd send them to their room, not to the White House."

 

The former NJ governor is especially scathing on the former president’s mishandling of government documents, which led to the 37-count indictment he now faces, calling the conduct “awful.”  “This is vanity run amok, Ego run amok,” Chris Christie told Anderson Cooper during a CNN Town Hall. “He is now going to put this country through this, when we didn’t have to go through it.”  Mr Christie added, “We’re in a situation where there are people in my own party who are blaming D.O.J. How about, blame him? He did it. He kept — he took documents he wasn’t supposed to take.”

 

The impact of Mr. Christie’s tough criticisms of the former president can be seen in an increased willingness of other Republican presidential candidates to more directly take on Mr. Trump in their public statements.  In the wake of the former NJ governor’s fierce attacks, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott, for instance, have grown more critical of Donald Trump’s actions in the documents case. 

 

As a few astute observers have noted, Chris Christie’s most significant contribution to the Republican nomination contest may end up being his role in expanding the Overton window, creating a permission structure for more direct and sharp criticism of Mr. Trump within the Republican party, not through his direct persuasion of Republican primary voters.

 

While he remains a long shot for the nomination, Mr. Christie has already had more of an impact on the conversation surrounding the nomination contest and the early media coverage than any of the other candidates, except for the two frontrunners, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.  He is increasing the odds that someone other than the former president will capture the nomination. If this turns out to be the case, the new Republican standard-bearer will owe Chris  Christie a huge debt of thanks- as will the nation.