The Big Problem With Chris Christie’s Presidential Announcement

Next week, Chris Christie will make it official: At a town hall on Tuesday in Manchester, New Hampshire, the former New Jersey governor will announce that he is running for president.

Chris Christie’s case for the presidency primarily boils down to two arguments. The first is that he’s sort of like Donald Trump—a brash, loud jerk who says what he thinks and brings a certain WFAN regular caller vibe to politics—but, crucially, is not Donald Trump. The thinking here is that Republican voters want someone who is a jerk (probably true) but would like that person to be more competent and even-keeled than the former president (the jury is still out). On this point, moreover, Christie may have the thinking backward: GOP voters like Donald Trump when he is brashly criticizing other Republicans (like Chris Christie) but may not be quite so keen on hearing an establishment figure go at Trump. Still, Christie is betting that he can outmuscle Trump on the debate stage—the way he once bullied Marco Rubio (but not ... Donald Trump).

On that point, Christie is also betting big that New Hampshire is the place to mount his political comeback. There is some logic to this. In 2020, Joe Biden easily bested Trump in the Granite State, performing five points better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. New Hampshire voters may be souring on Trump, the thinking goes; in any case, primary campaigns need momentum and Christie is banking on finding some in New England. The big problem with this theory though is that Christie has been here before. Christie famously destroyed Rubio’s presidential campaign on a New Hampshire debate stage shortly before the state’s 2016 primary. Doing so didn’t help Chris Christie—he dropped out shortly after the election after winning a shade over 20,000 votes (7 percent) in the state’s primary in 2016. Instead, the candidate he helped was … Donald Trump. Christie is betting that the game has changed since, but he’s an even more marginal figure in Republican politics now than he was then, even if the taint of Bridgegate has worn off. There’s nothing to suggest that this time around will be any different for Christie.

Self-proclaimed “independent” and “caucus of one” Representative Nancy Mace brought a set of literal brass balls to Steve Bannon’s War Room program, as she whipped up support for sending the country into default.

Mace appeared on the far-right host’s show Wednesday, digging into her opposition to the debt ceiling bill. She seemed to have impressed Bannon after posting a nearly 20-tweet thread on Tuesday criticizing the bill.

“Her Twitter threads … have been some of the best,” Bannon said Wednesday.

Progressives are opposed to the bill, by virtue of having been made hostages who have to agree to increased work requirements for food aid and economic assistance for the poorest Americans. Mace’s opposition, however, is rooted in the bill not doing enough cutting.

Mace claims to have taken issue with the government’s growth over the last three years—so much so that she had no problem appearing on a white nationalist’s show to complain about the debt bill.

When she wasn’t explaining her strong opposition to the government making people’s lives better—or calling herself “independent” because of her supposedly “moderate” views on abortion (Mace has continually fallen in line with Republicans on anti-abortion bills)—she was showing off a pair of literal brass balls she brought from South Carolina, to illustrate how she apparently has more balls than her Republican colleagues by being opposed to any bill that doesn’t cut more from the government.

Wednesday was not the first time Mace appeared on Bannon’s show. Just a little over two weeks ago, the South Carolina Republican joined Bannon to talk about the House Oversight Committee’s never-ending and fruitless investigations in Joe Biden.

White House and Republican negotiators seem confident that the new debt ceiling bill will pass, but it’s going to be a long fight to get there.

At least 33 Republicans have already signaled they will vote against the bill, with several calling for Kevin McCarthy to be ousted from the speakership over the measure. And many progressives don’t like the bill either.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal told reporters Wednesday that she would vote “no” on the debt bill and implied that many other caucus members would do the same. She noted the Democratic caucus meeting had a somber tone because “people feel like this never should have been the case in the first place.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said earlier this month that she would “never” vote for legislation that included spending cuts to programs or lacked a “clean” debt ceiling, meaning an increase without conditions. Her office confirmed her stance on Tuesday. Representative Greg Casar told MSNBC he would also vote “no,” describing the bill as a “ransom deal” and a “hostage situation.”

Representative Ro Khanna said that he believed enough Democrats would back the bill so that the United States won’t default, but “some of us are going to vote no on principle.”

“We don’t believe that you should be taking away food assistance from the most vulnerable when we have an affordability crisis, that you should be hurting people who are student loan borrowers,” he told Morning Joe.

A big sticking point for progressives is the changes the bill would make to food assistance. The deal would impose work requirements for the SNAP program, or food stamps, and lower the number of people who qualify for work requirement exemptions. The bill would also change the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, potentially making it harder to get cash assistance.

Not only will all this make it harder for people to get food aid, but the Congressional Budget Office found that work requirements wouldn’t actually help the deficit all that much.

Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed the bill for “demanding we pinch pennies” on food assistance and health care. “This is not fiscal responsibility. It’s cruelty,” she tweeted Tuesday.

Representative Cori Bush said she was “leaning” toward voting against the deal. “As somebody who was a food stamp recipient, there is absolutely no way I can see myself green-lighting something that will take food from people’s mouths,” she said.

Jim McGovern, a leading anti-hunger lawmaker in the House, put things the most bluntly: Republicans are cutting “funding that helps the most vulnerable in this country,” he said. “Give me a goddamn break.”

“Republicans are unfit to govern,” McGovern said. “I didn’t come to Congress to hurt people. And when I listen to my Republican friends, what is clear to me is that we don’t share the same values.”

On Tuesday, twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and liable-for-sexual-abuse former President Donald Trump attacked his former press secretary, “Kayleigh Milktoast McEnany,” on his far-right social media platform, Truth Social.

Imagine reading that sentence in 2015.

“RINOS & Globalists can have her,” Trump said (“RINOS” meaning Republican in name only).

Trump went after McEnany after she appeared on Jesse Watters’s Fox show, where she discussed Ron DeSantis’s polling in Iowa. “If you look at the polling now, it was Trump [with a] 34 [point lead] in Iowa, it’s now Trump 25,” McEnany said, noting that team DeSantis saw this as a positive sign of growth since announcing the campaign. “Still, Trump’s hugely ahead, but they say they’re closing the gap. That’s their argument,” she followed.

It’s not entirely clear what poll McEnany is citing; the most recent Iowa poll had Trump up by 42 points.

“Kayleigh ‘Milktoast’ McEnany just gave out the wrong poll numbers on FoxNews. I am 34 points up on DeSanctimonious, not 25 up,” Trump lambasted on Truth Social. “She knew the number was corrected upwards by the group that did the poll.”

Trump appeared to be trying to call McEnany “milquetoast,” but, as often is the case, spelling is not his strong suit. It’s not clear what poll Trump is referring to either, for that matter.

“FoxNews should only use REAL Stars!!!” Trump concluded.

McEnany received all that flak for making observations based on numbers she presumably assumed were true. All while still noting that “Trump’s hugely ahead.”

Beyond serving as Trump’s main attack dog and shield against the press for years—both on the campaign side and in the White House—McEnany was among the leading public-facing peddlers of false claims about the 2020 election.

The day after January 6, 2021, McEnany took to the White House press podium to defend the administration, saying that “those who violently besieged our Capitol are the opposite of everything this administration stands for.” It’s a humorous claim now, given Trump has since repeatedly expressed his eagerness to pardon “those who violently besieged our Capitol.”

Twitter’s value has tanked since Elon Musk took over six months ago, with the company now worth just one-third what he originally paid for it.

Musk paid $44 billion for the social media platform in October, an amount he raised with the help of 19 outside investors, which included Fidelity Investors. The company released its monthly disclosure of portfolio valuations on Tuesday, which revealed just how far Twitter has fallen.

Twitter, under its new name X Holdings Corp., was worth just $6.5 billion at the end of April, a 66 percent drop from when Musk first took the reins.* This is the second time that Fidelity recorded a decrease in Twitter’s value. Just a month after Musk bought it, Twitter’s value dropped 56 percent, according to Fidelity’s valuations report.

Musk insists there’s no issue at Twitter, but he knows better. During an interview with the BBC in April, Musk claimed Twitter was close to being “cash-flow positive.” But just a month before, he reportedly told employees that the company was worth only $20 billion, less than half what he paid for it.

Since taking over, Musk has gone to great lengths to make Twitter profitable. Those methods include firing about three-quarters of all employees, accepting money from the Taliban, not paying rent, and begging people to sign up for the Twitter Blue subscription plan. That last strategy is going super well: Far fewer than 1 percent of the platform’s more than 500 million monthly users subscribe to Twitter Blue.

Musk also gutted content moderation guidelines and let Nazis back online, which has allowed hate speech to flourish on the platform, including on his own profile. These moves sent advertisers fleeing in droves, and any efforts to win them back have been unsuccessful. Musk even self-sabotaged a bit by allowing erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson to launch his new show on Twitter.

So all in all, the tanking market value sounds like just another day at Twitter under Musk.

* This piece originally misstated the valuation of Twitter at the end of April.