Chris Christie

speaker

239 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 22 Mar

Chris Christie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart · The Cons & Cons of Trump with Gov. Chris Christie · 30 Jan 2025 podcast

They may not vote in any of the other ones, but they feel like for president, I should vote. And turnout reflects that. And it was a choice here that I think really unfortunately for the country, the Democrats didn't present a choice that for a lot of Americans made sense. And I blame that on President Biden because he made a promise to us in 2020. He said he was going to be a transitional leader.

And we all understood or thought we understood what that meant, which was he was going to serve one term because at 82, he was just going to be too old to be able to do this. And then for whatever reason, he changed his mind. And I think if Joe Biden had left and said, not left the presidency, but had said after the midterms, you know what? I held off the Republicans here at the midterms.

I did my job. And now it's time to turn it over to a new generation of Democrats to see who the next nominee will be. I think the Democrats would have had a vigorous primary, a lot of really good potential candidates out there. Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. You go through a whole list of them.

And instead what he did was hang on till he was practically being, you know, shoved out the door with his fingernails grasping the door jam and left Kamala Harris as the only option. And vice presidents are never well thought of, no matter which party it is. It gave her 107 days to try to convince the American people that she was better.

And I think strategically for her, the big mistake was she didn't distance herself from Biden. And when 72% of the country, as the last poll the last weekend, said the country's on the wrong track, not separating yourself from the person who was president when it went to 72% wrong track is a politically fatal mistake.

So I think, John, for people who don't focus on politics, who maybe didn't think about this election until two or three weeks or maybe even less before election day, all that stuff matters and is part of the explanation for why he did as well as he did.

I think that maybe the goal of some of the folks who work with Donald Trump I don't think Donald Trump has any overarching philosophical goal except that he wants to be powerful and listen to and in charge. I think what is causing this is you're right about the underlying problem, which I've heard from Republicans and Democrats, which is I just want some competence. Like it's their objection to,

is less to, in the main on the programs and things that government does, is less about the programs in a lot of instances and more about the way they function or don't function, the way they waste money, the way they don't bring things to the people that they really need and aren't responsive. And you can look at this in a number of different ways.

The wildfires in California are just the latest example of it. But people are like, how the hell does this happen? Why isn't government on top of this? And we've seen it over and over again in a number of different ways. Everything from something as serious as the wildfires to something as just annoying as the air traffic control system.

And why are people so delayed when they're flying around the country all the time? Because it doesn't seem like the FAA can run the air traffic control system competently anymore. And I think that that anger... when people feel like they're paying a lot of money for this government and what are they getting for it, is something that Trump was really able to tap into.

And that, for whatever reason, the Democrats felt the need to defend it holistically. Rather than say, look, you're right. You know, it can be done better. And here are ideas for how it can be done better. Rather than say, he's wrong. You're wrong. There's nothing wrong here. Everything's okay. Well, people, you know, they have eyes of their own and they make their own conclusions.

So I think it's a little more complicated.

Well, and look, I would say to you, yeah, everybody gets selective about what they want to get outraged about. often depending upon where you sit politically or philosophically. But I do think that there are things that can and should have been done in that instance. And quite frankly, let's personalize it. We're both from New Jersey. We went through Sandy.

And I think we've done a lot of things since Sandy that we learned to make structures more resilient, to not be piling up houses all along the shore that can't possibly sustain storms, to reinforce all of our infrastructure in ways that recognize that these storms can now happen. so that we protect those things. And I think that that's what people are expecting.

communities that were really dense with millions of people in arid areas that have fired things like i'm pretty sure that was not dei that was probably a white dude who designed that like what are we doing well and i look i think you and i are saying the same thing i think that there's there's bad decisions that are made and you can't the other thing that i used to say to people all the time when i was governor was there's some things that i just can't help

Like, you know, you can do the very best you can, and there's some things you can't help. Now, people don't like to hear that. And part of it is that people just don't like when bad things happen for obvious reasons, and they need someone or something to blame. Now, you know, when you're also doing things that don't make sense to people, those become easy straw men to knock down, right?

So if people look at DEI, and I think a majority of the people in the country now feel this way, that maybe that's not the best way to be making some of these selections and choices of people for jobs, and maybe it should be based predominantly, if not exclusively, on competence.

And that's my point. My point is that just diversity in and of itself is not something that causes there not to be merit hires, okay? You can look at two resumes blind, and if your example is a really good one, whether it's Lloyd Austin or Pete Hegseth on the paper, Lloyd Austin has significantly more high-level experience to be Secretary of Defense than Pete Hegseth does.

I think that what has developed over time, because some people have taken that to an extreme, meaning the DEI implementation, is it allows people to think that, and in some instances they're absolutely true, it's absolutely true, that those decisions were made purely for the diversity part of it, with the merit being well below it.

Right. Look, I would give you the way that I tried to approach it. I became a U.S. attorney in New Jersey in 2002. I had never worked in the office before. So when I got there, I just did a lot of walking around the office to see, like, okay, who's here? And John, it was the whitest, malest office I had ever been in in my life. And it was, and I was coming from private law practice.

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