Meet the Press: Former Gov. Chris Christie
Interview
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I don't think we need people who are in it for themselves seeking retribution.
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Kristen, it's great to be back. Thank you so much for having me.
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Well Kristen, look, I know you all spent a whole lot of money on national polls, so I don't mean to go after the polling folks. But the fact is that national polls don't matter. We don't have a national primary. If you look at Donald Trump in the latest polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the two earliest states, he is barely at 40% in Iowa, and he is under 40%, at 34% and at 38%, in New Hampshire. That means that between 60% and 65% of Republican voters in those two very important early states want an alternative. And in those -- in places like New Hampshire, I'm in second place behind Donald Trump. So you know, this whole race is going to change when people actually vote, Kristen. And no offense to any poll that comes out now, but if it's a national poll, if we don't have a national primary, I don't spend more than three minutes thinking about it.
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No, look, Kristen, you understand the way this works. You're very experienced at this. The whole race will change when Iowa happens, and the race will change in New Hampshire. And I'm telling you that if I beat Donald Trump in New Hampshire, and I plan to do so, that his sense of invincibility, his sense of inevitability will go away. And there are a lot of Republicans in those numbers, even in your national numbers, who are going to be with Donald Trump just because they think he really is the only alternative to Joe Biden. When I beat him in New Hampshire, folks are going to know he's not the only alternative to Joe Biden. And we'll do it just the way, by the way, Joe Biden did in 2020. You remember quite well, he lost Iowa and New Hampshire. Everyone said he was dead. He won South Carolina and went on to sweep Super Tuesday states in places where he didn't even have an organization and never spent one day campaigning. Momentum is everything in this race. I'll establish it in New Hampshire.
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Well look, my strategy is not based alone on electability against Donald Trump. Donald Trump made a bunch of promises. I was on that stage in 2016, Kristen. He made a bunch of promises to fellow Republicans and then fellow Americans in the fall and didn't deliver. He said that he was going to repeal and replace Obamacare. And even with a Republican Congress, he failed. He said he was going to build a big, beautiful wall across the entire border of Mexico. He built 52 miles of new wall in fall years, and the Mexicans haven't paid their first peso towards it. By the way, if he goes at that pace if he got a second term, he'd only need another 110 years as president to finish the wall.
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Lastly, and I think most importantly --
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-- Kristen, he said he's going to balance the budget in four years and he added $7 trillion to the national debt, the worst record of any president in four years in American history. He broke his promises to the voters, and we're making a case on that much more than we're making it on electability.
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Well, they shouldn't feel like it, because I've explained it really well. First off, I supported him in 2016 because he was going to be the nominee, and because I didn't want Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States. And I make no apologies for that. I still don't want Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States. But I broke from the president very clearly, from President Trump, on election night 2020. When you stand before the American people, behind the seal of the President in the east room of the White House, and say the election has been stolen when it wasn't, and there's no evidence to prove that it's stolen now nearly three years later, that to me was the disqualifying moment for Donald Trump. He's continued to do that and worse since then. And so you know, listen, American elections are about who's left to vote for. And I made the decisions I made then. And Donald Trump left me, I didn't leave him.
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Well, I did take a stand when he said Iowa was stolen. I was on the stage and said that he -- that was untrue, that Ted Cruz had won it --
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He didn't say -- well look, Kristen, the fact of the matter is that I didn't want Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States. And this is much different, much different. When you're President of the United States and people think you actually know something, know something they don't know, because you're President of the United States, that's what made what he did in 2020 so destructive. And we know from looking at what's happened since then that a lot of American people believed it because he was President, because they thought he knew things they didn't know. That goes much further than anything you just mentioned, and by the way, will not be the determinative thing in this election either. But people need to look at that history like I did, and that's why I broke from him.
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I'm glad that the Justice Department acted, and they acted on some very horrific facts. Look, I did this Kristen, as you know, for seven years as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, the fifth largest office in the country. We did 130 corruption cases and never were defeated. So I know a bit about this. There is no way that any public official has any legal, or plausible, or ethical explanation for having $500,000 in cash stuffed in jackets and envelopes throughout their home, gold bars that have the fingerprints, DNA of someone who you were attempting to fix the system for. I commend the Southern District of New York for doing the right thing. And by the way, I do not believe the whole Department of Justice has done things that were wrong. I believe what David Weiss did in Delaware was wrong with Hunter Biden, and it gave people the sense that there were two tiers of justice --
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I'm glad to see the Justice Department doing --
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Only after pressure, Kristen.
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No, I have no interest in being in the United States Senate.
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Yes. I have. I have throughout my entire career. I had a chance to appoint myself to the United States Senate, Kristen, in 2013 when Frank Lautenberg passed away and I was governor. If I didn't appoint myself to the United States Senate, the easiest way to get there, I sure as heck am not going to run for it.
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I think Speaker McCarthy is managing a very difficult caucus under very difficult circumstances, and doing the very best he can. And we're going to see. He's paid to deliver results, and we need to find a way to avoid a government shutdown. It will be bad for the economy, it'll be bad for the American people --
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And by the way --
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I do. I think Kevin McCarthy will continue to be speaker through the 2024 election. And then if he's speaker in January of 2025, I look forward to working with him as President to try to solve some of the problems that Joe Biden has created, and solve some of the problems that Donald Trump didn't solve even though he promised he would. And I'll say this, Kristen, you started off with some of the debate stuff. And I'm looking forward to Wednesday night. I'm looking forward to continuing to make my case there. It is, it is unfortunate and selfish that Donald Trump's not going to be there. But I want to keep staying on that stage going forward. People should go to ChrisChristie.com, donate so that when Donald Trump does show up I'm the one there waiting for him.
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It's the latter. And we learned much more --
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-- from when I first said that -- Kristen, we learned a great deal between when that comment was made, which is when the phone call was first released, to what we've learned now. And that's the most important thing about someone who's running for president. What you need to do is to make sure that when you get all of the facts, you don't stay handcuffed to something that you said when you didn't know all the facts. And when you learn all of them, you make sure you lay it out, and you let people know. Look, I did that based on what I knew then. Now that all the facts are out, we know exactly what he did. And by the way, he's also made very clear that he didn't want to be supportive of Ukraine anyway, Kristen. And he's made that clear by making clear he'd turn Ukraine over to Vladimir Putin in 24 hours if he became president again. That's not the kind of person we want in the Oval Office. That's the kind of person who will destabilize Europe and will destabilize the world by America not being a leader.
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Kristen, thanks for having me on. I look forward to being back.
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