July 16, 2023

Chris Christie Rips Trump for Touting Indictments as a “Great Badge of Honor”

The former New Jersey governor ramps up attacks on the GOP presidential frontrunner.

Republican presidential candidate former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.Jose Luis Magana/AP

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Chris Christie made the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows this weekend, ramping up attacks on former President Donald Trump as he continues his own latest bid for the GOP presidential nomination. The pugnacious former New Jersey governor seized on comments Trump made Saturday night at the Turning Point USA conference in Florida, where Trump claimed that the multiple criminal indictments he now faces are a “great badge of honor.”

“Every time the radical Left Democrats, Marxists, communists, and fascists indict me,” Trump said, “I consider it to be a great badge of honor and courage. I’m doing it for you. I’m being indicted for you.”

Christie, who has defined his candidacy so far by being the only GOP presidential hopeful willing to criticize Trump directly, blasted the ex-president on CNN Sunday. “He’s a liar and a coward,” Christie told State of the Union’s Jake Tapper. “He’s not getting indicted for anyone other than because of his own conduct. When he says he’s doing it for us, that’s a lie. And when he was doing all the things that he was doing with those documents, it shows exactly what a coward he is.”

Christie continued the assault on ABC on Sunday, taking aim at Trump’s repeated lies about having won the 2020 election, a subject that most of the rest of the GOP field has refused to touch. “The fact is that he doesn’t believe he won,” Christie told George Stephanopoulos in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” “He was concerned before the election that he was losing. And I know that because he said it to me directly…But his ego, George, won’t permit him to believe that he’s the only person in America, outside the state of Delaware, to ever have lost to Joe Biden.”

Christie’s campaign finance report filed Saturday doesn’t reveal a candidate really taking off. His fledgling campaign, launched in June, has raised only $1.7 million, though that is $500,000 more than former Vice President Mike Pence has raised. But watching Christie and Trump go at it may be one of the more colorful features of the 2024 GOP primary season. Christie is the rare Republican candidate who can and is willing to match Trump’s brash New York talk with New Jersey trash talk. Trump’s surrogates have noticed. At the Turning Point USA conference Sunday, longtime Trump intimate Roger Stone quipped, “Chris Christie needs to run. Not for President, he just needs to run!”

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