Why Chris Christie should stay in the race

Even if the front-runner should stumble, the thinking goes, there’s no way the Republicans would turn to the only contender who has been delivering an Arctic blast of truth about Trump that the MAGA-fied party clearly doesn’t want to hear.

But that’s precisely why it’s not a bad thing that Christie plans to stick around. It is fair to wonder, given that he was one of Trump’s earliest backers, whether he is on a quest to become president or to find redemption. Regardless, he is doing something no other challenger has the spine to do.

Christie has moved into third place in New Hampshire, the state where he has staked his entire campaign strategy. Independents can vote in the Jan. 23 Republican primary, which is one reason the New Hampshire electorate is less far right than other early-primary states. But even as Christie’s poll numbers tick up, so do his negatives.

In a Washington Post-Monmouth University poll conducted this month, 60 percent of eligible primary voters said they view Christie unfavorably and only 29 percent expressed positive feelings. The numbers were almost an inverse of Trump’s granite-solid approval among those New Hampshirites.

No doubt, this shows how much Christie relishes talking about the fact that the likely Republican nominee stands accused of 91 charges across four criminal cases. That sets him apart from the other Trump rivals who are registering in the polls — former U.S. ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — and who have even entertained the possibility of pardoning the former president if he is convicted.

Nor have the indictments, or the growing number of ex-Trump aides who are turning state’s evidence, come up more than glancingly in the three GOP debates that have so far taken place.

Christie, on the other hand, has said that what happens in the cases against Trump is “the most important question in the race.”

“Let me tell you what’s going to happen this March. He’s gonna walk into a courtroom in Washington, D.C., and his own former chief of staff Mark Meadows, has cut a deal for immunity,” Christie told a crowd that had packed in to hear him at an Elk’s Hall here. What Meadows will testify, Christie predicted, is that he committed crimes at Trump’s behest — and that the former president himself is guilty of a few that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“Now, let me ask you something everybody,” Christie added. “If that doesn’t disqualify you from being president of the United States, what the hell does?”

In an interview, I pointed out to Christie that voters might question his own judgment, given that he hopped aboard the Trump train as soon as his own 2016 presidential campaign flamed out and didn’t get off until Trump was defeated four years later and started trying to overturn the election result.

“I admit it. I was wrong. I mean, all you could do is admit you’re wrong,” he conceded.

He is contemptuous of his rivals — especially Haley — for their delicacy where Trump is concerned. She laments the “drama and chaos” that follows the former president, as though Trump himself is blameless for it.

“My argument with Nikki is that you can’t be everything to everybody,“ Christie told me. “People ask me, why are your negatives higher than Nikki’s? Well, because I made the choice early on to go after the front-runner — unabashedly, on the merits.”

He also calls out the other candidates in the race for some of the action-movie scripts they are feeding the Republican base. Both Haley and DeSantis have promised that they would send U.S. Special Operations over the Mexican border. DeSantis even said he would have the Border Patrol shoot migrants on sight if they were suspected of running drugs.

“No American soldier is going to shoot somebody stone-cold dead as they come across the border without knowing who that person is," Christie said at his town hall. "What if they have a legitimate claim for asylum? We just can’t go summarily executing people. Who are we — Putin? We don’t do that stuff.”

After seeing Americans fall for Trump’s 2016 promise to build a border wall and have Mexico pay for it, Christie told me, “I am no longer of the opinion that something will be obviously ridiculous to voters. I think you have to make the argument.”

At some point, the reality that Christie is delivering to his party will have to extend to his own prospects. Still, he told me, “You cannot give up in terms of pushing the message. You can’t beat Donald Trump without beating Donald Trump.” Christie might not be the candidate who can do that, but if someone else actually does, he should be remembered as someone who helped make it possible.