Can the Republican Party be saved from itself—and from Joe Biden? That was the subject that former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tackled in a recent book, and one I spoke about with him in an interview this week.
Governor Christie’s career has been a wide and varied one. Trained as a lawyer, he worked for a number of years as a lobbyist and a local legislator. In 2001, he was appointed by President George W. Bush as the US attorney for the District of New Jersey. He served in the position until 2008, during which time he became known for carrying out high-profile corruption investigations and prosecutions.
In 2009, he ran for governor of New Jersey and won. He won again in 2013 and served as governor from 2010 to 2018.
In 2016, he entered the presidential campaign, but he dropped out of the race after the New Hampshire primary and endorsed Donald Trump. He served for a time as the head of the transition team for the incoming Trump administration; eventually Vice President Mike Pence took over the role.
In 2020, Christie helped prepare Trump for the presidential debates with Joe Biden. But he began criticizing President Trump’s unwillingness to concede after the election, and he added to that after the January 6 riots at the US Capitol.
Christie’s latest book, Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden, discusses his view on where the Republican Party is and where it needs to go next.
When I spoke to Jason Miller recently, he told me that Donald Trump will undoubtedly run for president in 2024. You just wrote a book entitled Republican Rescue that is critical of Trump. Where do you see yourself in the Republican Party right now?
I see myself as telling the truth as I see it. The book isn’t intentionally critical of Trump, unless you consider the truth to be critical of him. The facts are that he decided to stake his political future on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. I’m a former prosecutor. I examine the facts, and I let the facts determine my opinion. The facts are that there is no evidence at all to substantiate the idea that the election was stolen. I go through that in some detail in the book, and I think that we damage ourselves as a party as we continue to look backwards rather than forwards. Every minute we spend talking about the past is time we aren’t critiquing the Biden administration and the things it’s doing that are harmful to the country. That’s what we should be spending our time on.
Donald Trump has proven himself to be politically astute, and I wonder if the Democratic Party has forced him to take that position because of the various investigations into the events of January 6. Perhaps he feels the need to maintain that the election was stolen to counter that.
Please. He was saying that at 2:30 a.m. on election night. What was he defending himself against then? What evidence did he have then? I was the first major office holder in the country to endorse Donald Trump in 2016. I chaired his transition. I chaired his Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission. I played Hillary Clinton in debate prep. I also played Joe Biden. The line of supporters for Donald Trump forms behind me. However, he has been wrong about this since election night. It has been damaging and injurious to the party and to the country. I make that very clear in Republican Rescue, and I stand behind every word I wrote.
Let’s discuss the current president, Joe Biden. The country is suffering from extremely high inflation and possibly a recession as well, which brings us back to the Jimmy Carter era, when there was inflation on top of a recession. What’s your take on that?
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