If Trump Runs in 2024, He May Find Chris Christie Ready to Rumble by George F. Will

Political Crossfire If Trump Runs in 2024, He May Find Chris Christie Ready to Rumble

By George F. Will

The New Jersey political style is simmering truculence between brawls. Chris Christie, the state’s former two-term Republican governor, indicates – by his words and, as important, his demeanor of surplus pugnacity – that he is spoiling for a fight.

He is brimful of combativeness, even when, on a recent evening, his attention was divided among Republicans’ misadventures, President Joe Biden’s shortcomings, and a plate of pasta. Christie might find an outlet for his spiritedness in the Republicans’ 2024 presidential competition. Donald Trump should not assume that he can avoid Republican opposition if he becomes the first former president since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 to reenter presidential politics. If Trump hopes to be the second president, after Grover Cleveland in 1888, to regain the presidency after losing a reelection bid, he might find Christie ready to rumble.

Trump’s most successful policies – tax cuts, deregulation, judges evaluated by Federalist Society criteria – did not differ from those of actual Republicans. His manner emphatically did. More than a smidgen of pugnacity might be needed by a Republican presidential candidate attempting to hold Trump voters while winning back those repelled by him. If combativeness without infantile name-calling and pathological lying is the recipe, Christie might be the chef.

For perhaps a majority of Trump’s voters, the former president’s bad-boy persona was the point. For them, policies mattered less than experiencing through him the cultural catharsis of offending those they find offensive. Among the 36% of registered voters with a college degree, 56% voted for Biden. Republicans need to regain ground with this cohort without forfeiting votes on the other side of the “diploma divide.”

Florida, the most important swing state, has become less White and more Republican, which suggests to Politico’s Zack Stanton that “non-college educated white people have more culturally in common with working-class Black and working-class Hispanic voters.” Christie twice won the governorship of a state that last voted Republican in a presidential race in 1988. He received 32% and 51% of Hispanic votes in 2009 and 2013, respectively, and 9% and 21% of Black votes, respectively. No Republican presidential candidate has received 21% of the Black vote since 1960.

Jeffrey H. Anderson, president of the American Main Street Initiative, argues (in the Claremont Review of Books) that the Republican road to the White House runs through Big Ten country: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa. In two elections, Trump won more victories in these states (7) than Republican presidential candidates had won over the previous seven elections combined. Christie’s implicit case for himself is that he can appeal to the Trumpist majority of the Republican base without further debasing it, the GOP, and the nation.

With his new book “Republican Rescue,” Christie begins reacquainting Trump voters with reality. The book often is an awkward mixture of strategic reticence and obvious evasions, but not on one important point: He demolishes what he calls the “drivel” about fraud stealing the 2020 election. Readers will be in no doubt about the identity of the prime driveler.

On election night, when Trump cried fraud, Christie says he was shocked. But he pointedly notes that weeks earlier, when Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power, he replied, “Well, we’ll have to see what happens.” Christie writes that he thought Trump had “better have evidence” of fraud. But Christie mercilessly dissects Trump’s years of indifference to evidence – his original flight of “inflammation without information” – regarding Barack Obama’s birthplace.

The book’s schizophrenia is so undisguised it seems tactical. Christie is daring to acknowledge, and demonstrating a willingness to undertake, the political contortions necessary to propel the Republican Party up from Trump, away from performative entertainment and back to politics. Christie is saying: No one worked harder than I did to put my friend of 20 years in office and keep him there, and he is a liar, and a relic.

Christie says he does not want to make his divergences from Trump “personal,” but he surely knows that for Trump everything is personal. Christie inveighs against “wallowing in the past” and “the quicksand of endless grievances.” In Florida, the thick man with the thin skin is not wondering to whom Christie refers, and will not be forgiving just because Christie was, as he repeatedly reminds readers, “the first major officeholder” to endorse Trump.

The Trump parenthesis in Republican politics will not end without a fight. One pugilist seems ready.