Chris Christie doubles down on Trump attacks and Social Security cuts
Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie arrives to speak at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton on June 23, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images
Former New Jersey Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie launched his latest blitz against Donald Trump on “Fox News Sunday.”
He claimed that the former president has lied about the size of his rally crowds and failed to keep his policy promises.
“The people in the Republican Party, and quite broadly across America, are tired of having political candidates who are snake oil salesmen who just don’t tell them the truth, who tell them whatever they think they want to hear at the moment,” Christie told Fox News.
Christie deemed the estimated sizes of Trump’s rally crowds “absurd.”
“Tens of thousands don’t show up anymore. That’s another one of the big lies,” he added. “All you have to do is look at the pictures.”
Christie has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics, even as the former president who is currently embroiled in several criminal investigations carries a significant polling lead in the GOP’s crowded candidate pool.
Trump and Christie also diverge on Social Security reform.
Trump has rejected cutting the program at all. In the Sunday interview, Christie was even more staunch in his stance on means testing for Social Security, which would exclude people at higher incomes from receiving those benefits. He also stood by his proposal to raise the retirement age.
“Do the extraordinarily wealthy need to collect Social Security? Do we really need to have Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk collecting Social Security?” he said.
A former U.S. attorney, Christie also criticized the five-year-long investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes, saying it is “either a lie or it’s incompetent.”
“There’s no way that it should take five years to get to a two-count misdemeanor tax plea and then to dismiss the gun charges” against President Joe Biden’s son, he said.
Christie launched his long-shot bid on June 6 and is trailing Trump’s numbers at around 2.5%, though he has gained some steam relative to other candidates, according to aggregated polling from RealClear Politics. The former governor has also touted big donors supporting his campaign.
To secure a spot in the Republican primary debates starting in August, the GOP candidates will have to get 40,000 contributor donations and poll above 1% in either three national polls, or two national polls and one state poll.
