On Aug. 29, 2012, Chris Christie took the stage at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. The conservative Republican governor of deep-blue New Jersey led his speech by talking about the improbability of him even being there. The ideological makeup of his state was only the most recent obstacle he’d faced.
“Dad grew up in poverty. … Mom also came from nothing. … She was tough as nails and didn’t suffer fools at all,” Christie told the Washington Examiner. “The truth was she couldn’t afford to. She spoke the truth — bluntly, directly, and without much varnish.” The brash, combative former prosecutor added: “I am her son.”
The greatest lesson Christie’s mother taught him was when she said to him: “There would be times in your life when you have to choose between being loved and being respected. She said to always pick being respected, that love without respect was always fleeting — but that respect could grow into real, lasting love,” he said.
His mother was referring more to personal relationships, “but I have learned over time that it applies just as much to leadership. In fact, I think that advice applies to America today more than ever. I believe we have become paralyzed by our desire to be loved,” Christie said.
Whether he desired it or not, Christie, at the time, was loved enough to cruise to a second term in a state where his fellow Republicans were outnumbered by Democrats by about 700,000 voters. After that, however, Christie needed the love of national Republicans to run for president in 2016. His candidacy for the GOP nomination wasn’t competitive.
He still, however, sees politics more or less through the same lens as he did a decade ago.
“I’ve seen people tie themselves into knots trying to follow what a poll says or whatever someone says on social media because they think that it’ll get them some support and affection,” he said. “When in the end, I think a leader’s job is to tell the truth. And if that’s against what it says in the polls right now, then your job is not to follow the polls but to change them. So I think what I felt back then I think is even more true.”
In a word, leadership. And the lack of such leadership forms Christie’s central critique of President Joe Biden. The president’s mishandling of the catastrophic train derailment and subsequent control burn in East Palestine, Ohio — and his decision not to show up and comfort those residents — is the most recent but arguably most glaring example, said Christie.
In that instance, Christie said Biden should’ve ignored not the polls but whoever was giving him the poor advice that he shouldn’t be drawing even more attention to the disaster. “Your job in those moments is to ignore staff and use the things that you’ve learned in over 55 years of being in politics. The fact that he didn’t do it tells me one of two things: Either he has lost those instincts and that’s bad news for him as a potential candidate for reelection in ’24 or he ignored those instincts.”
Christie’s no stranger to natural disasters: The day after Hurricane Sandy hit, he was in Belmar, New Jersey.
“When I landed in the helicopter and got off, there was a woman probably in her mid- to late 60s who came running towards me with such a purpose that the State Police stopped her. I told them to let her go through, and she came through and she grabbed me and hugged me and started to cry,” he recalled.
She then told him something he never forgot, “She said, ‘I’ve lost everything, but thank God you’re here. You haven’t forgotten us.’ And it was the lesson to me that I followed for the rest of Sandy, and that was that people need to know that if you are the leader, the executive, that you haven’t forgotten. And your presence is the only thing that can convince them you haven’t forgotten them.”
For the next six weeks, he said he spent a good part of his day out in the field: “I don’t think for an executive there’s any substitute for that in a disaster. You need to see it for yourself. You need to feel what they’re feeling. And you need to let them know that you haven’t forgotten them.”
Christie’s experience was also a hard lesson in the complicated nature of national politics, which often forces a governor to choose between his state and his standing among the rest of the country, or at least the rest of his party. Superstorm Sandy hit in the fall of 2012, the home stretch of a presidential election year. Christie had already declined to run, opening himself up to the charge that he missed his window for a shot at the presidency. Many conservatives thought Christie would’ve had a better shot at defeating Barack Obama than eventual Republican nominee Mitt Romney, so he was falling out of favor in those corners as well. When Obama visited the storm-smashed Jersey Shore, Christie welcomed him at Atlantic City International Airport. To the conservatives already frustrated with Christie for not running against Obama, thus, in their minds, boosting the president’s reelection chances, this scene cemented their discontent.
Christie’s embrace of Donald Trump in 2016 didn’t do much to bring him in from the cold with conservative grassroots and activists. Trump’s victory threw him no lifeline. He was denied a place in the administration. Now he appears to be leaning toward running for president again, and in classic Christie style, he has taken aim at both Democrats and Republicans.
“Yes, I’m actively considering it, and I’m going to make a decision, I would say, certainly by no later than early to mid-May,” he said of his final decision on whether or not to run.
He believes the sense of urgency to declare as soon as possible is a creation of the modern media environment.
“Having done it before — and that was a very early forming race in 2015 — I mean, Jeb Bush got into the race in, I think it was December of 2014,” he said of the former Florida governor who suspended his campaign in February 2016. (In fact, Bush announced his exploratory committee in December 2014, signaling he was running but not launching it for several months.)
“Having gone through that, I think I’m much better educated for the fact that a lot of the stuff that we did early was almost meaningless in terms of the ultimate result,” he said.
“If I do decide to run, I’m not going to go through the same exercise of doing things that are useless. You need to be smart about it. And that’s what I’m going to do. I think having done it before, too, you realize all the ramifications of the decision on your life and everything else, which I think makes you take a moment or more to actually think about it before you make a decision one way or the other,” he said.
Trump, by contrast, could barely wait to jump in, announcing his intentions in November soon after Trump-aligned Republicans flopped in the midterm elections.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley made her announcement in February, followed by biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy later that month. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has indicated that if he runs, it will come after the state’s legislative session ends in late May or June. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is also considering a run, as is Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
Christie points to one way facing Trump in the primaries will be different than it was in 2016: “I think we all have to come to grips with the idea that we are running against an incumbent in Trump.”
The advantages of de facto incumbency are obvious, but Christie sees it as a double-edged sword. “In 2016 nobody, nobody knew what kind of president Donald Trump would be. A lot of us like myself, who was the first person to endorse him who had been in the race, really believed that he could rise to the job, that the job would inspire him, and that it would cause him to raise his own performance to meet the burdens and the responsibilities of the job,” he said.
But Trump never fulfilled those expectations, Christie said. “He told us during that campaign in ’16 that we were going to do so much winning that we would be sick of winning. Yet in 2018, we lost the House; in 2020, we lost the White House and we lost the Senate; and in 2022, we lost more governorships, another seat in the Senate, and historically underperformed in the House.”
“So, I’m tired of losing, and I’m tired of being disappointed. And I think most Republicans are, too. And that argument needs to be made and made directly to the people of our party. And then we’re going to see how they react,” he said.
Biden and Trump are hardly Christie’s only targets. He points the finger at China for its role in the fentanyl crisis. The deadly drug’s route into this country originates in China, goes into Mexico or other parts of South America, and then comes across our border via the cartels.
“This is why Gov. DeSantis’s recent comments about not wanting to get into a proxy war with China drives me crazy — because if you don’t think we’re already in a proxy war with China, you’re being naive or just don’t understand what’s going on,” he said. Christie was referring to DeSantis’s recent warning against getting too involved in Ukraine’s defense against Russian invaders, lest we end up in a proxy war against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s benefactor Xi Jinping.
“Fentanyl is one of the fronts of the proxy wars China is waging against the United States. They are sending the instruments of death into our country every day over the southern border. If that’s not a significant national security issue, then I don’t know what is. And if that doesn’t mean that we should change our posture towards China, I don’t know what else will convince us,” he said.
“We need to have an administration that’s going to refocus not only on securing the border to stop the flow of fentanyl into this country but also to completely reconfigure the way we deal with the issue of addiction in our country,” he said.
Christie said Xi is paying far more attention to each beachhead in this proxy war than Biden is. That includes Xi’s recent, and very public, trip to Moscow and Beijing’s quiet but effective backstage diplomacy that included brokering a diplomatic deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia earlier this month.
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“What we’re seeing going on around the world right now is China is testing us in another part of their proxy war by allying itself with Russia and by inserting itself with Iran into the Middle East,” he explained. “They’re saying to our allies and our adversaries around the world, ‘America is no longer reliable. They won’t stick with you. Stick with us. We will stick with you.’”
“The idea that we won’t step up and do what we need to do to give Ukraine the resources that it needs to be able to defend itself and defeat Russia, and by defeating Russia putting a defeat on China as well, to me, misunderstands history. And if you misunderstand history or ignore it, you’re doomed to repeat it.”
Salena Zito is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner.
