Christie Blasts Trump’s ‘Awful Lack of Judgement’ After Neo-Nazi Dinner, Dubs Him ‘Untenable General Election Candidate’
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Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) tore into former President Donald Trump on Friday after Trump’s dinner this week with avowed Neo-Nazi and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes made national headlines.
“This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,” Christie, who is a possible 2024 rival to Trump, told the New York Times.
The Times’s Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer reported that Christie, once a close friend and ally of Trump, speculated on why the former president would host such an abhorrent public figure.
“He can’t stand not having attention all the time,” Christie explained. “And so, having someone show up at his club — even if you believe that he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was — and want to sit with him, feeds the hunger he feels for the attention he’s missing since he left the presidency.”
Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that during the dinner Trump and Fuentes “fawned” over each other. Swan wrote that at one point during the conversation Trump asked Fuentes, “‘You like it better when I just speak off the cuff,’ the source said. Fuentes replied that he did, calling Trump an ‘amazing’ president when he was unrestrained. ‘There was a lot of fawning back and forth,’ the source added.”
Trump has been roundly condemned, including by far-right publication Breitbart, for breaking bread with Fuentes. Fuentes is the leader of the so-called Groyper Army and holds an annual white nationalist conference as counter-programming to CPAC. Groypers are a loose network of alt-right figures who are vocal supporters of white nationalist ideals, often trolling mainstream conservative events to try and move conservativism more toward white nationalism.
Fuentes, who has also denied the Holocaust, supports “the closure of the U.S. borders to immigrants while opposing “liberal” values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Fuentes views these societal changes as the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed,” according to the ADL.
Christie, who has known Trump for over 20 years, briefly led Trump’s transition team in 2016, but was not given a role in his presidential administration.
