Chris Christie refuses to blame MAGA Republicans for 'authoritarian problem' — only Trump
Chris Christie on Monday called out Donald Trump over what he described as the former president’s authoritarian impulses.
The former New Jersey governor and current Republican presidential nominee during an appearance on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” pushed back after the host asked him to comment on a suggestion by a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who wrote that the news media is failing to frankly describe the Republican party’s authoritarian streak, before taking aim at Trump.
“You haven't read the column, I assume, so I'm not even going to ask you about it,” Tapper said. “But you do describe the conduct of Donald Trump trying to overturn the election as reprehensible, you do condemn it. But so many people in your party, and I'm not just talking about people running for president or on Capitol Hill. But I mean, voters, Republican voters don't seem to have a problem with it. And I'm wondering, do you think that your party has an authoritarian problem, that they really honestly don't have a problem with violently trying to stop a free and fair election from going forward?
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“I absolutely don't think that we have that problem, I think what we have is a Donald Trump problem, and that right now, what's gone on is that people view Donald Trump synonymously with the Republican Party, and that if you oppose Trump, that's somehow favoring Biden, and many Republicans don't want to do that for very obvious reasons,” Christie said.
“And I think that that's why we need to have this full debate and discussion that we just really started on Wednesday night, about who should be leading our party and who should be leading our country. And I've said very clearly on the authoritarian side of things, this is Donald Trump's problem, not the Republican Party's problem.”
Authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned that the Republican Party is now the party of tyranny, when speaking to MSNBC last week.
"It is now a party that is dependent on lying, on corruption because election denial, a third of the House, Republican members are election deniers," she told co-host Ali Velshi. "Election denial is not just, denying a fact or a belief, having a false belief. It's an act of corruption. It is refusing to recognize the rule of law and the rules of democracy. They are also dependent on violence. The point is that when a party becomes yoked to the destiny of a lawless authoritarian, his goal is to debase them and bring them down to his level. And he makes them complicit in his crimes. And so, a kind of spiral of radicalization happens where the party, and now the party elites —some of them are under indictment, under investigation — they become more extreme and they take positions they never would've imagined they would take. This is why seeing the journey of this party, that's why I am calling GOP 2024 a race to the bottom."
Christie suggested the vast majority of those in his party aren’t admirers of murderous dictators as is the former president in his view.
“He's the guy who thinks that Vladimir Putin is an excellent leader and is brilliant. He's the guy who thinks that President Xi is straight out of Hollywood. He's the guy who thinks Kim Jong Un is wonderful. I mean, these are things that he has said about these authoritarian leaders, and it's because Donald Trump would like to be one himself. He likes that, he doesn't want to debate with anyone, as he showed on Wednesday night. He doesn't want anybody to disagree with him,” Christie said.
“And look that's just not the way our system works.”
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