Chris Christie formally enters 2024 race, as he takes square aim at Trump

Christie, who is set to announce his run at a town-hall-style event in New Hampshire Tuesday evening, has already begun laying out an aggressive case against Trump based on the former president’s policies — namely, that he made a number of promises that he never delivered.

That case is one that other hopefuls have generally sidestepped, instead largely avoiding saying Trump’s name. By contrast, Christie has gone directly at him.

He has mocked Trump’s dwindling crowd sizes, called him a loser and said that he crossed a line with his actions that led a pro-Trump mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

And he has described himself as able to capture the nomination. “I am the viable Trump alternative,” Christie recently told The Daily Beast.

Still, Christie’s path to winning the nomination is complicated. He is a northeastern Republican who has not been enmeshed in the culture wars of the Trump era. His main path would necessarily be through New Hampshire, a state where he waged a fierce campaign in 2016 but ultimately came up short. And to gain traction, he will need to rely on attention from candidate debates.

His campaign will depend heavily on media coverage and a nimbleness to travel to places where that is likeliest. New Hampshire is the state where he will begin his campaign, but not necessarily where he will hunker down.

He still needs to meet the criteria set by the Republican National Committee to get on that debate stage, which includes 40,000 unique donors.

Yet if he makes it, as a onetime friend of Trump, he has a keen understanding of the former president and how to get under his skin. Depending on how the race goes, Christie’s main impact could be in badly damaging Trump, whom he has been attacking with gusto. But he has been encouraged by a number of Republican donors and senior officials in recent weeks, particularly as DeSantis stumbled before even becoming a formal candidate.

Christie, a former federal prosecutor, will be in a unique position to attack Trump’s various legal travails, as Trump is the first former president to be indicted and is facing the potential for additional indictments in other cases.

Still, Christie will face questions about his conversion from Trump supporter to detractor. (Trump, after leaving office, referred to Christie as “an opportunist.”)

Christie was a favorite of some Republicans to run for the nomination in the 2012 campaign, when he was one of the country’s most famous governors, known for tangling with union leaders and selling himself as knowing how to balance a budget. But instead of running that year, while his star was rising, he chose to focus on running for reelection, receiving national attention for his response during the devastating Hurricane Sandy — and criticism from some Republicans for appearing with President Barack Obama in New Jersey days before the election at an event related to the storm’s aftermath.

The anger among Republicans presaged a political environment in which Republicans punished their elected officials for comity with Democrats.

By the time Christie announced he was running for president in 2015, when there was no longer a Democratic incumbent, his candidacy had been hobbled by the so-called Bridgegate political revenge scandal that swamped his administration two years earlier.

Christie denied involvement in the alleged payback scheme involving closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge to get back at a political opponent of the governor, and convictions against two defendants were overturned in 2020 by the U.S. Supreme Court. But by then, Christie’s political fortunes had been damaged.

After dropping out of the 2016 race, Christie endorsed Trump that February, one of the first prominent national Republicans to do so. That endorsement was valuable to Trump as he tried to appeal to Republicans who were skeptical of him over his comments calling for a ban on Muslims entering the country, or his misogynistic statements about Fox News host Megyn Kelly.