Tweet Share Share Comment Chris Christie came into the 2024 presidential race having already decided that he wasn’t worried about winning, which meant he could be the honest one in the race. This doesn’t mean Christie is a trustworthy person; it just means he can be honest now, because he has nothing to lose from saying things many Republican voters will find objectionable.
About midway during Wednesday night’s Republican debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—did you know there was a debate Wednesday night?—this truth-saying stance allowed him to briefly assume the role of moderator. Speaking directly to Ron DeSantis, but by implication to the other candidates present as well—those being Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy—Christie asked whether Donald Trump should be president again. “Is he fit,” asked Christie, “or isn’t he?”
DeSantis and Haley don’t want to answer this, because they’re still hoping to pick up voters or convention delegates who have affection for Trump but may, in the future, perhaps if he’s convicted of a felony, decide that he is too risky to nominate for the presidency. This is an extremely small needle-eye to thread, which isn’t to say that it’s not their only viable strategy. As for Ramaswamy, he’s polling at about five percent and appears eager to make the jump to being a far-right shock-jock personality; on Wednesday evening he insulted Christie’s weight, claimed that the investment firm BlackRock is orchestrating the imposition of wokeness on America—big if true—and described Jan. 6 as an “inside job,” whatever that means. Which is to say that he doesn’t want to alienate Trump’s more conspiratorial supporters either.
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So, they didn’t answer it. DeSantis muddled around an effort to argue that it would be nice but not necessary to have a person younger than 78 years of age leading the country. (That’s how old Trump would be if inaugurated in 2025.) Haley and Ramaswamy were conspicuously silent, abandoning the field to Christie, who pointed out that the criminal charges against Trump, particularly those relating to his effort to overturn election results and his failure to protect sensitive national security information, are fairly serious, and that Trump’s bid for a second term appears to be motivated more by the motive to “exact retribution” than to do anything in particular for the country. Despite this, Christie charged, his ostensible competitors for the GOP nomination are “making excuses” and “pretending that he’s a victim.”
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No one objected to that characterization. (The closest anyone came to doing so was Haley, in her closing statement, referring obliquely to her aversion to “chaos,” “vendettas,” and “whining.”) Which tells the whole story of the primary, both as a matter of substance—the Republican Party’s position on Trump remains that he is being treated very unfairly by nasty liberal prosecutors—and as a horse race. Haley’s mini-surge into a tenuous second place may be legitimate, and she took an opportunity to exude charisma and momentum early on when the other candidates were ganging up on her over a quickly abandoned position she took on social media anonymity. “I love all the attention, fellas,” she said with a smile. “Thank you for that.”
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But she didn’t press a case against Trump, even to point out that she beats Joe Biden by a much wider margin than he does in hypothetical general-election matchups, which is something that I would have hammered on several times in every answer if I were still trying to make up a 30-point margin on him with six weeks until voting begins, as she is in Iowa. The most animated she got all night may have been during a late free-for-all over which candidate has best protected elementary-school bathrooms from the trans agenda; one’s position on the merits of the issue aside, it’s likely that most voters would agree that a United States president should not be saying the word “bathrooms” as much as the candidates did on Wednesday.
Is Haley downshifting into a bid to be Trump’s vice-presidential nominee? Or was she just having a low-energy night? It’s impossible to say. But it can be said with some certainty that if she continues to implicitly tell Republican voters that there’s nothing dangerous about nominating Trump, they will probably listen to her.
Tweet Share Share Comment - Donald Trump
- Republicans
- Nikki Haley
- 2024 Campaign
The Most Telling Moment of the Final GOP Primary Debate
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07.12.2023
Tweet Share Share Comment Chris Christie came into the 2024 presidential race having already decided that he wasn’t worried about winning, which meant he could be the honest one in the race. This doesn’t mean Christie is a trustworthy person; it just means he can be honest now, because he has nothing to lose from saying things many Republican voters will find objectionable.
About midway during Wednesday night’s Republican debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—did you know there was a debate Wednesday night?—this truth-saying stance allowed him to briefly assume the role of moderator. Speaking directly to Ron DeSantis, but by implication to the other candidates present as well—those being Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy—Christie asked whether Donald Trump should be president again. “Is he fit,” asked Christie, “or isn’t he?”
DeSantis and Haley don’t want to answer this, because they’re still hoping to pick up voters or convention delegates who have affection for Trump but may, in the future, perhaps if he’s convicted of a felony, decide that he is too risky to nominate for the presidency. This is an extremely small needle-eye to thread, which isn’t to say that it’s not their only viable strategy. As for........
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