Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie vowed on Thursday to ‘run into’ former President Donald Trump on the campaign trail since the latter refuses to show up for the GOP primary debates, but he openly worried about what the Secret Service’s response would be.
Christie, a 2024 Republican presidential contender who has been polling poorly since he entered the race, issued his threat during an interview with Fox News.
“Get ready. That’s all I’m going to tell you,” Christie told Fox News in New Hampshire, where he filed to put his name on the GOP primary ballot. The state holds the second-in-the-nation primary after Iowa.
“Because if I give [Trump] and the Secret Service a tip as to where I’m going to be, it will be a lot harder for me to get to him. Remember, he’s the only guy walking around with Secret Service protection. So, that makes all of this a little more complicated. But I also was in law enforcement, so hang with me,” Christie, a former federal prosecutor, added.
Fox News added:
Christie, who like Trump is a master of in-your-face politics, repeatedly touted that he’s got the debate chops to target Trump. The former president remains the commanding front-runner for the Republican nomination as he makes his third straight White House run, even while juggling an historic four criminal indictments, including two for his alleged attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Biden.
But with Trump skipping the first two GOP presidential debates and saying he won’t take the stage at next month’s third debate, Christie pledged early last month that he’d find another way to make sure that the former president is not the Republican Party’s 2024 nominee.
“We’ve got 100-plus days until the primary. Donald Trump and I will come face-to-face, whether it’s on a debate stage or whether it’s when he’s walking out of a building somewhere,” Christie pledged.
The former governor was the first to endorse Trump in 2016 after he failed to win early primaries. He went on to lead Trump’s presidential transition team and was named to head up a panel to address the opioid crisis during Trump’s administration. But the two had a huge falling out after Trump continued to claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, much in the way Democrats complained when he beat Hillary Clinton four years earlier.
“He’s completely full of crap, and he makes it up as he goes along,” Christie charged while in New Hampshire.
He went on to argue that Trump is “a soulless human being. He cares about no one but himself. And any New Hampshire voter who thinks he gives a d— about you, your life, your family, you’re kidding yourself. He doesn’t. So, if you think this race has been interesting up until now, I haven’t got my tank full of gas yet. He’s in for it.”
Christie also said that “guys from New Jersey are used to dealing with obnoxious blowhards from New York our whole life, so we have no problem dealing with them in a presidential race.”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, meanwhile, responded to the governor’s verbal assault, telling Fox News: “What a sad, pathetic parasite. He should really drop this fake tough guy act because everybody knows he’s a b**ch.”
