Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that former President Donald Trump does not have the “character” to be president.
Christie said, “I’ve been in the race for less than three weeks and already in third place in New Hampshire, only four points behind Ron DeSantis, who has been in the race for a longer time and is supposed to be the co-front-runner. Look, people understand that folks need to take responsibility for what they do. And my message to the folks at Faith and Freedom, which did get some good reactions, too. Of course, I expected the boos that is predominantly a Trump crowd, but they need to hear the truth, too. Character is the single most important element of a president of the United States because you can’t know every issue that’s going to come across the president’s desk. It’s not a litmus test with checkboxes in them. What you need to know is what is the character of that person.”
He added, “Frankly when I listened to Donald Trump’s speech last night, he had the audacity to say that he got indicted for us. Now I don’t know how it benefited the American people for him to take highly sensitive intelligence documents to stonewall the government from returning them, to subject himself to a raid by the FBI even though they asked him voluntarily to return this stuff, and to then be subject to an indictment which is obviously going to be one of great trouble for the country because no one wants to see this happen. Donald Trump says that’s for us. It’s absurd. The same way he has absurdly claimed in the last week, he still won the 2020 election, and he said that’s how he’s going to persuade suburban female voters to vote for him in 2024 that didn’t vote for him in ’20. Look, this guy lost in ’18. He lost the Senate and the White House in ’20. The House in ’18. He lost two more governorships in 2022. He is a three-time loser. We do not need our party to go to a fourth loss because Joe Biden, in my opinion, is an awful president. We can’t afford to have him from age 82 to 86 in the White House or, even worse, have Kamala Harris assume the presidency. That’s the stakes here. It’s not about whether you think Donald Trump has been treated fairly or not by the media or by elements of the Justice Department. It is about whether he is a man of character who can lead this party to victory, and I don’t believe he can.”
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