Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has ramped up his attacks on GOP powerhouses Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former President Donald Trump. His attacks come as he continues to pitch his 2024 campaign.
Though he hasn’t made an official announcement, Christie has continued to hint at a 2024 run through media appearances and meetings with potential donors. Christie pitched himself as the only viable Republican alternative to Trump.
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“I am the viable Trump alternative,” Christie told the Daily Beast.
“I think we’ll lose if Trump’s a nominee. That’s why I intend to be the nominee,” he added.
Christie believes that his approach is unique due to the fact that he personally knows Trump; thus, he is best able to criticize him. He picked out his ability to attack other candidates as one of his strengths, as he reflected positively on his treatment of Marco Rubio during the 2016 Republican primary, crediting himself with crippling the formerly ascendant Republican’s campaign.
“’Cause I know him better than anybody,” Christie said at a town hall last month, the Hill reported.
“There’s nobody who can criticize you better than someone who knows you best. And there’s no one in this field, if I got into it, that would know Donald Trump better than me. So I think those people would find me to be the most credible critic, out of anybody else.”
Despite his confidence, polling shows that Christie has a long way to go if he hopes to be the nominee. A RealClearPolitics aggregation of recent polls found that Christie is polling at an average of just 1%. Several polls don’t even consider the former governor as a candidate.
But despite the obstacles, Christie points to history as a reason for optimism.
A Christie aide, speaking with the Washington Examiner, pointed to the 2008 Democratic primary and 2015 Republican primary.
“The two frontrunners in the early 2015 GOP primary were Scott Walker and Jeb Bush,” he said. “Walker didn’t even make it past September.”
He also stressed former President Barack Obama’s underdog status early in the 2008 Democratic primary.
With the past uncertainty in mind, the trajectory of the 2024 primary is “anyone’s guess,” he said.
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Christie himself echoed this sentiment last week, admitting that he doesn’t know what path he could take to win the presidency but that no one else knows their path either.
“I had someone ask me yesterday on one of these phone calls, ‘Well, explain to me the exact path that gets you there.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t,’” Christie said last week. “And anybody who says they can is completely full of it, you know? Explain the Donald Trump path in 2016. Who had that one predicted? Not even Trump.”
