Chris Christie and Donald Trump.Photo: Heidi Gutman/Walt Disney Television/Getty; SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty
“And that’s not speculation,” Christie, a former Trump supporter, said in an appearance on ABC’sThisWeekon Sunday. “That’s based upon the polling that I was privy to pre-the 2020 election and what we saw actually happen in the 2020 election. And it’s only gotten worse since then.”
Christie said that the failure of Trump-endorsed candidates in the 2022 midterm elections is further proof that support for the former president is eroding.
“We could go through the entire list — loser, loser, loser, loser — and I think Republicans are recognizing that,” Christie said of Republicans like Blake Masters, Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano — all of whom lost their races in 2022.
Christie is a former ally who led the Trump transition team as he entered the White House in 2017 and later helped him prep for debates with his 2020 opponent, DemocratJoe Biden.
Christie broke away from Team Trump when he refused to concede the election to the winner, now President Biden, calling his legal challenges over the results and his conspiratorial claims about the loss a"national embarrassment."
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Speaking to PEOPLE in a 2021 interview, Christie spoke openly about Trump’s electoral loss, saying: “Someone needed to stand up and say, ‘Look, we need to get real and we need to start getting the job done because if we don’t, we won’t have a role in this country moving forward.’ "
He added that, while the two have gone back and forth in public since the election, Trump had not spoken to him privately in months.
“Look, I think Donald Trump and I have been friends for 20 years,” he says. “During that friendship, we’ve had our ups and our downs, but my view is: I’m going to be here to tell the truth as I see it.”
In 2021, sourcestold the political news website Axiosthat Christie was “seriously considering” running for the Republican nomination in 2024. Trump, meanwhile, has already announced his 2024 campaign.
source: people.com
