Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) needled his old friend, former President Donald Trump, over the smaller crowd sizes he drew at the Conservative Political Action Conference Saturday.
Trump has long taken pride in the colossal and enthusiastic crowds he’s been able to draw while ribbing his foes who fail to attract such an outpour. Christie, who has kept a 2024 run on the table, contended that the less-than-stellar Trump showing at CPAC was indicative of his waning influence.
“You saw the scenes at CPAC, that room was half-full,” Christie said on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “The reason I don’t think the rallies are going on … I don’t think the rallies would be nearly as big as they were before.”
CPAC 2023 suffered from lower attendance levels than prior iterations of the feted conservative gathering broadly. While Trump garnered considerably larger crowds than his 2024 GOP foes who addressed the conference, reporters on the scene captured footage of some of the empty chairs in the Potomac Ballroom during his keynote.
BREAKING: There might have been even less people at former President Trump‘s CPAC speech tonight than there were at his son’s speech where he attacked disabled people.
Who else can’t wait for Trump to post a doctored image of his crowd size again? pic.twitter.com/Bgq1svswDh… https://t.co/6iWgWdCIcL
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) March 5, 2023
“Look, he is the front-runner, there’s no doubt. He’s essentially an incumbent president running for renomination, not reelection, but renomination. And so, of course, he’s the front-runner right now,” Christie continued.
“There are lots of indicators here that he’s not what he used to be, in most respects,” he added. “So we’re going to see how that plays out.”
Christie befriended Trump during the 2000s while serving as the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. He later ran against him in the 2016 election cycle before dropping out and endorsing him. In the time since Trump’s departure from the White House, Christie has become more publicly critical of the former president, triggering Trump’s wrath.
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Ahead of his CPAC speech, Trump revealed that he would not drop out of the 2024 race if he was criminally indicted by one of the many investigations revolving around him.
“Well, what the hell else is he going to say,” Christie mused about Trump’s resolve. “If you get indicted, you know, you’ve got to say that, or else it’s a death knell.”
