It was even more amusing listening to Christie tear into Trump. He called him a “bitter, angry man who wants power back for himself” and told a story about Trump urging him, when he was governor, to declare bankruptcy for the state of New Jersey. He imitated Trump like Alec Baldwin would on “Saturday Night Live.” He even went after Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner — whose father, you’ll remember, he helped put in prison when he was a prosecutor — for the $2 billion investment Kushner secured from a fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. “The grift from this family is breathtaking,” he said.
But my enjoyment of his newfound Resistance shtick doesn’t bode well for Christie. The people he needs to win over are not liberal New York Times columnists, but voters who hate liberal New York Times columnists. The trick, for a Republican, is going to be painting Trump as a weak loser who will sabotage right-wing priorities. At times Christie tried to do this, as when he criticized Trump for his failure to build the border wall and repeal the Affordable Care Act. But many of his criticisms were decidedly centrist. He attacked Trump for “idolizing” Vladimir Putin and trying to extort President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, admitting, in an offhand line, that Biden deserves admiration for uniting Europe against Russian aggression. He praised John McCain, expounded on the necessity of compromise and agreed with one questioner that Trump had “traumatized” the country.
At one point, in response to a question about drug prices, Christie spoke about the need to protect pharmaceutical innovation, lauding Pfizer’s investment in mRNA vaccines. I appreciate that he won’t pander to his party’s Covid skepticism, but I also can’t imagine this going over well with the Republican electorate. Later, in response to a question about “reproductive justice” from a young woman who appeared to be pro-choice, he said the matter should be entirely left up to the states, which should be free to enact laws as permissive or as restrictive as they wish. That might be a good stance for a general election, but it is sure to alienate influential right-wing activists.
So what is Christie up to? One theory is that he wants to redeem himself after his humiliating embrace of Trump by filleting him on the debate stage, much as he did to Marco Rubio in 2016. But to qualify for the debates, Republican candidates must have at least 1 percent support across several polls, have at least 40,000 individual donors from 20 states or territories and pledge to support whoever wins the Republican nomination. Even if Christie clears the polling and donor thresholds, he’s already sworn never to back Trump again, and his entire campaign is premised on Trump’s total unfitness.
Maybe Alan Steinberg, a former Bush administration official and a columnist for Insider NJ, was on to something when he speculated that Christie might eventually run as an independent. “Given the virtual impossibility of Christie winning the 2024 G.O.P. presidential nomination, would he be willing to accept the role of the presidential candidate of a 2024 center-right independent party?” Steinberg wrote in April. After all, if Trump is ultimately nominated to face Biden, a contest most Americans do not want to reprise, the clamor for third-party candidates is likely to be intense.