GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie said on Sunday that he does not believe he waited too long to break ties with former President Trump.
The former New Jersey governor told Fox News host Howard Kurtz on “MediaBuzz” that he reached a “breaking point” with the former president over Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election and his actions before the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
“I was saying it after what he said in 2020, we all have different breaking points, Howie,” he said. “We all have a moment where we say, ‘Enough is enough.’ That was my moment.”
“I don’t think I waited too long, Howie. I think that the right thing to do is to try to make the person who’s in the White House the very best president he can be for the whole country,” he added. “That’s what I tried to do. Turned out that I failed at doing that. So if you want to criticize me for not changing Donald Trump despite my best efforts, I’ll plead guilty to that.”
Christie, who announced his own White House bid earlier this month, has been a staunch critic of the former president since late 2020. He has said that his willingness to confront Trump will be advantageous to him in the 2024 GOP primary election, where he has taken aim at many of his opponents for defending Trump.
On Sunday, Christie also took aim at the interview Trump did with Fox’s Bret Baier last week when the former president claimed that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
“When he decided that his ego was more important than our democracy and he decided to lie to the American people and tell them the election had been stolen and did it just the other night on Bret Baier’s interview on this network,” he said. “That’s why I broke with him in November of 2020. And we haven’t spoken since December of 2020.”