Chris Christie Is Going To Screw This Up

In recent days, the national press has been reporting that failed New Jersey Governor and former Trump hostage Chris Christie is planning on entering the 2024 race for the Republican presidential nomination. But Christie is not joining the stupidest crowd of GOP candidates in American history because he plans to win; instead, he wants to take out Donald Trump and clear the field for a new leader to change the direction of the party. This plan will fail, and in fact, it will make the old GOP’s chances of reclaiming control of the party less likely to work. Here’s why:

Christie’s claim to the throne of candidates-able-to-destroy-Trump stems from a particularly notable moment in a 2016 Republican debate just before the New Hampshire primary. Marco Rubio and Chris Christie had been engaged in a long feud since the beginning of the campaign, and in this debate, that fight would come to a dramatic climax. But to understand that moment, and how we got there, we have to rewind. Marco Rubio and Chris Christie’s political careers were both born within a year of each other, during the height of the conservative backlash to Obama’s election as President. In 2009, a U.S. Attorney appointed by George W. Bush in 2001 named Chris Christie ran against the incumbent Democratic Governor of New Jersey, Jon Corzine. With the back room support of former Bush operatives like Karl Rove, Christie was propelled to the top of the GOP primary. While the campaign was riddled with many small and unique issues only relevant at the time, the biggest factor in the race was that the American economy was in ruins right in the middle of the campaign. The unemployment rate was at nearly 10%, and many Americans were angry at President Obama for not having solved the problem yet. Christie’s campaign fed off of this economic angst, and defeated the incumbent Democrat by a margin of 4%. With such a shocking victory in a state that voted for President Obama by double digits just a year before, many republicans saw Christie as a rising star that could take on the incumbent Obama in 2012. 

In 2006, Marco Rubio was elected as the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and in the 2010 midterm elections, Rubio was given an amazing opportunity to advance his career. George LeMieux, a Republican Senator from Florida appointed by then-GOP Governor Charlie Crist had announced his intention to retire from the seat, opening the doors for a new Republican. Marco Rubio jumped at the opportunity. For Florida Republicans, one of the most well-organized and well-funded state parties in the country, likely only bested by the Reid Machine in Nevada, Rubio checked every box. He was a young Cuban American who exuded a positive vision of conservative values that could resonate with minority voters in Southern Florida and along the I-4 corridor that had previously supported President Obama. With the help of a divided liberal coalition stuck between newly independent Charlie Crist and an unknown Democratic candidate, Rubio cruised to victory in the red wave of 2010. 

In the 2012 presidential election, Chris Christie was thought to be a dream candidate for republicans against President Obama, but shockingly announced his intention to not enter the race for President. With Rubio still a baby senator, he wasn’t ready for prime time, but with the GOP convention being held in Florida, Rubio was granted the prize of the Keynote speech. His speech was a success, and a welcome gift to conservatives of a possible future generation of leaders who could appeal to an ever-diversifying America. 

As we know, republicans suffered an embarrassing defeat in the 2012 election, with their White Guy-Whiter Guy ticket of Romney and Ryan unable to overcome Obama’s advantage in minority-America. Despite winning 59% of the White vote, the same percentage as George H. W. Bush in his 8-point victory against Dukakis in 1988, Romney did not even come close to winning the election. With 2012 done-and-dusted, 2016 was just around the corner, and conservatives raced to find a solution to their ever-growing problem. Republicans conducted the now-infamous 2012 “autopsy,” and the report concluded that republicans needed to rebrand themselves as a party committed to a diverse and inclusive American society. If they didn’t, Latino voters, black voters, and urbanites would lock them out of power. Conservatives turned to Marco Rubio as the silver bullet for their race problem, and they once again gifted him a spot on the national stage to speak in response to Obama’s 2013 State of the Union. But Rubio flopped. And he flopped horribly. His speech was trite and uninspiring to any human being outside the Beltway. And we can’t forget the moment that decapitated his chance to shine in the spotlight: Rubio pausing his speech and reaching far outside the camera’s view to drink from a child-sized plastic bottle of water. It was devastating, and it woke up Republican operatives to the dark truth about Rubio they didn’t want to hear: He was a lab-grown candidate that checked boxes but couldn’t pass a personality test. Rubio had become inauthentic and a creature of Washington just after 3 years in the office. On the other hand, Chris Christie, despite coming under fire from Democrats for years, managed to win re-election in 2013, a much less favorable year for the GOP. 

With the 2016 election wide open for both parties, Rubio and Christie leaped out of the woodwork to run for the presidency. But the two men directed their campaigns in very different angles. Rubio, with his water-bottle incident in the rear view mirror, continued to accelerate into the “electable” lane. As one of the few mentally stable minority candidates (because I can’t in good conscience count Ben Carson as “electable”), he could appeal to the conservative donor base eager to have a President cut their taxes and deregulate their industries, and if winning over more Latino voters could do the trick, so be it, and he could appeal to the base of partisan Republicans hell-bent on having a Republican back in office by any means necessary. While in hindsight, we know that this lane was not a winning strategy, this was Rubio’s one shot, and he went for it.

On the other hand, Chris Christie’s campaign entered a very different lane than Rubio. Chris Christie was a big fat white guy from blue America, and did not represent a sophisticated, calm voice of cool-kid conservatives like Rubio. He was brash, and said it like it was - he was like John McCain’s straight-talk express without a Washington swamp creature as its namesake. But Republican voters still had PTSD from the 2012 election, when they nominated a Republican Governor from a blue state who proceeded to get shellacked by Obama. Christie had to differentiate himself from Romney, and his strategy was to trash members of the “Washington elite” to demonstrate his authenticity to Republican voters, and later, to the voters in the general election. If he could demonstrate that politicians in Washington were inept in comparison to his ability to accomplish real results as the governor of a state, he had a real chance of a breakthrough. With the largest field of candidates in history, Christie‘s campaign searched for targets of his message like a heat-seeking missile. His first victim was Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, an anti-government uber-libertarian elected during the birth of the Tea Party in 2010. Rand Paul was good a making a lot of noise about government overreach on privacy, but with ISIS in the forefront of the news, Chris Christie savaged Paul by calling him out for “blowing hot air in a subcommittee” but not actually doing anything for the American people, in contrast to Christie’s work as a governor, “keeping the roads open” and helping people get through Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

His attacks worked, and Rand Paul took a beating in the polls. Christie was also helped tremendously by the catastrophic collapse of three other Republican governors: Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal. With John Kasich as the only other incumbent GOP Governor left, Christie’s path to the nomination looked possible. But an unanticipated problem had emerged in the Republican Party: Donald Trump. Trump soaked up so much of the anti-Washington energy that fed Christie’s message that his takedown of Rand Paul wasn’t enough. He needed to destroy a bigger fish: Marco Rubio.

In the closing months of 2015, Christie’s campaign targeted Rubio with ruthless attacks on social media and advertising, with videos showing how Rubio frequently used the same speech over and over again, memorized each and every time. People began to make fun of Rubio as “Robot Rubio.”  After Chris Christie’s disappointing finish in Iowa, he had one chance left to make a splash in New Hampshire during the final debate before the primary. 

During the debate, Rubio got into an argument with his fellow candidates over President Obama’s policies, and Rubio whipped out a memorized message, saying “Let’s dispel with this fiction that President Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” Christie responded by making fun of Rubio and other people in Washington for their “30 second memorized speech.” But when Rubio got his chance to speak again, he said the EXACT SAME THING again. And Christie immediately shouted "Every morning when a United States senator wakes up, they think about, 'What kind of speech can I give, or what kind of bill can I drop?' Every morning, when I wake up, I think about what kind of problem do I need to solve for the people who actually elected me. It's a different experience." The viral exchange destroyed Rubio to a point of no recovery. Rubio only won in one state: Minnesota. And he couldn’t even win his home state of Florida. 

But Christie never got to redeem the fruits of his labor. He would finish near the bottom in New Hampshire, and dropped out of the race. His attacks on Rubio were essentially a murder-suicide. It took out Rubio, but it didn’t actually give Christie any extra points. 

There have been many moments like this in political history, when one primary candidate has nuked another into oblivion in a matter of moments, and sometimes it can boost the attacking candidate, and other times, it has no effect except on the victim of the attack. In 1984, Walter Mondale was able to dispatch his biggest opponent, Gary Hart, with a a memorable line panning him with an insult about his weakness in depth of policy: Quoting a then-well-known advertisement, Mondale said “Where’s the beef?” Mondale capitalized on both sides of the attack - he weakened one of his most powerful opponents, and provided a big boost to his own candidacy, which eventually won him the nomination. On the other hand, a more recent moment that Democrats remember is when Elizabeth Warren ripped Michael Bloomberg to shreds in the debates over his non-disclosure agreements and her strikingly salient message that democrats were taking a huge risk if they were simply going to "replace one arrogant billionaire with another." Elizabeth Warren’s attack absolutely worked on Bloomberg: His 1 billion dollars were burnt to a crisp, and he couldn’t manage to win any primary other than American Samoa. But it didn’t help Warren either. She never broke out of 3rd place, and lost to both Biden and Bernie in her own home state. 

Being the attack dog in a primary has its advantages, but Chris Christie is not going to win the Republican nomination. He is simply in it to take out the MAGA King. If the only viable alternative were not MAGA Variant Ron DeSantis, his cause might be noble, but unless Trump drops dead before Super Tuesday, there are only two men who can win the primary: Ron or Don. And Ron DeSantis, as Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer said, is just “Trump without the handcuffs.” He’s just as insane of a person, and will be just a fascist of a leader as Trump was. And, he will be more effective at carrying out his evil than Trump ever could be. 

If DeSantis wants to win the nomination, he must go after Donald Trump with a relentless barrage of fire and fury that does not cease until Donald Trump has been pulverized and nuked into oblivion. The problem is, no Republican candidate has been willing to go after Trump because opposing the MAGA King has been a kiss of death among conservatives. Every candidate in 2016 made the same mistake of believing that Trump would collapse under his own weight and get killed off by someone else. Imagine 100 people drive by a body in the street, but nobody wants to take the time and effort to call 9-1-1 to report it, and they all believe someone else will call it instead. In the end, nobody calls 9-1-1. That’s what happened in 2016. All the republicans waited on someone else to take a leap of faith and take out Trump, but nobody did it, and Trump slowly, but surely, took them all out. 

If all of the Republican candidates who don’t stand a chance at the nomination in 2024 had the guts to clear the field for DeSantis, it could immediately force the issue between the GOP that loves Trump, and the parts of it that are ready to move on. DeSantis could immediately pivot to attack mode, and have an opportunity to beat Trump in a 1 on 1. Christie believes that he can commit a murder-suicide against Trump, and clear the field for DeSantis to win a clear victory on Super Tuesday with a weakened Trump and a clear alternative. The problem is, Christie’s decision to go into attack mode is going to make DeSantis retreat away from attacking Trump. Again, remember the mistake republicans keep making: They keep waiting for someone else to take out Trump first. This will never succeed. If DeSantis doesn’t unite with his fellow Republicans to attack Trump, he will never break away as the clear alternative to Trump. Chris Christie alone is not enough firepower to destroy Trump, and when he starts the barrage of criticism towards Trump, I already know what will happen. As Chris Christie goes on the attack, the DeSantis campaign is going to move out of the line of fire, rather than engage, because they’re too scared of the consequences of getting into trench warfare with TrumpWorld. DeSantis will wait, and wait, and wait, and when the 2024 New Year rolls around, there will come a moment when Ron and his allies realize that Chris Christie couldn’t take out Trump without reinforcements. But it will be too late for DeSantis. By not establishing himself as a viable alternative to Trump who can bully himself to the nomination, DeSantis will fail to deliver a victory, and Trump will win the Republican nomination for the third time in a row.

If Chris Christie’s main goal is to help Trump lose, then he should not touch this primary with a 10-foot pole. He will only encourage republicans to make the same mistakes as they did in 2016.