Relax: that sound is not an earthquake, it’s Chris Christie to the rescue, hurrying to save us all from what he calls the “misery” of another Trump presidential term. You remember that “misery”: low gas prices and inflation rates, reviving American industries, peace in Ukraine and Israel, a reasonably secure border — that’s right, it was sheer hell. And now Chris Christie is going to do all he can to make sure we don’t have to suffer through all that again.
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The UK’s Guardian reported Friday that Christie, after failing abysmally to arouse any interest in his presidential candidacy among Republicans, “refused to rule out running on a third-party No Labels ticket.” The Guardian opines that this is “a step most observers rate more likely to damage Joe Biden than Donald Trump,” but Christie himself doesn’t see it that way. The zaftig former New Jersey governor said instead, “You know, I think the way I would look at it is, I will do whatever I can to try to make sure that the country doesn’t go through what I think will be the misery of a second Trump term.”
Wow, thanks, Chris, but of course if you save us from “the misery of a second Trump term,” we’re going to get the exponentially greater misery of a second Biden term, with all the anti-Americanism, socialism, mass migration, inflation, and curtailing of the freedom of speech that four more years of the Biden regime would without any doubt bring upon the American people.
The typically mercurial Christie called No Labels “a fool’s errand” last year, but more recently he was eager to walk those words back: “What I’ve said in the past, is that I’d have to see a path for anybody, not just me, but I think anybody who would accept that would need to see a path to 270 electoral votes. If there was ever a time in our lifetime when a third-party candidate could make a difference, I think it’s now. The question, though, is what kind of difference.”
Christie bases his notion that he could be that third-party candidate who makes a difference upon an indifferent and corruption-plagued stint as New Jersey governor, plus the one successful moment of his brief and disastrous 2016 presidential campaign when he humiliated and mocked Marco Rubio for repeating some campaign patter that Rubio had memorized. As a flustered Rubio struggled to get his bearings and kept repeating the same words, Christie taunted him, saying: “There it is — the memorized 25-second speech.”
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This nasty exchange, in which Christie appeared more as a bully than as anything else, was supposed to give us the idea that it was wrong for presidential candidates to have memorized any statements (why?) and that Christie himself was a plain-spoken straight shooter who never, ever doled out any canned answers himself (unlikely). Rubio did indeed come off as stiff, unnatural, and overly reliant upon his prepared material rather than daring to think on his feet, but Christie continues to kid himself if he thinks the incident made him look statesmanlike or presidential. It was no coincidence that his purposeless, passionless, aimless, and self-serving 2016 presidential campaign ended a week later.
Related: It Turns Out That Trump DIDN’T Try to Grab the Steering Wheel and Join the Jan. 6 ‘Insurrection’
Nowadays, however, Christie thinks that berating and ridiculing Marco Rubio seven years ago shows that he has what it takes. During his equally ill-fated 2024 entry into the Republican presidential field, he declared: “You better have somebody on that stage who can do to [Trump] what I did to Marco, because that’s the only thing that’s going to defeat Donald Trump And that means you have to be fearless, because he will come back and right at you.” He apparently did not remind the audience that Trump was among the candidates also in 2016, and Christie didn’t ever seize the opportunity to do to him what he did to Rubio.
The real problem, however, with the idea of a Chris Christie spoiler candidacy now is that it is an open question whether or not he has the backbone to stand up not to Donald Trump but to the leftist authoritarians who are entrenched in Washington. Christie has never shown that he has either any interest in doing so or any ability to do so if he did want to.
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Christie wholeheartedly endorses the Left’s Jan. 6 Big Lie, and in playing along with the Left’s propaganda in this way, he shows that he does not have either the will or the wit to stand up to the swamp and restore genuinely representative government to Washington. And would any patriots choose his kowtowing to the left over a genuine alternative to the Biden regime? Dream on, Mr. Christie.