You’ll Love What Chris Christie Had to Say This Morning about Mark Meadows

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has a message for Republican voters holding out for Donald Trump: It’s time to stop.

Christie’s warning comes days after news that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff and so-called “special friend,” flipped against his former boss, dishing dirty details on election fraud claims in exchange for immunity. It’ll be Meadows’s testimony, according to Christie, that seals Trump’s fate.

“This is deadly. It’s done. He’s going to be convicted. It’s over,” Christie told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Tuesday, describing Meadows as someone “velcroed to Trump’s hip” through the entire 2020 campaign and beyond.

In several alleged meetings with special counsel Jack Smith’s team this year, Meadows told federal investigators that Trump knew he was lying when he claimed he won, mere hours after the polls closed on election night. To this day, Meadows said he has yet to see any evidence of election fraud.

“I think everybody watching needs to understand from somebody who did this work for seven years, you don’t give Mark Meadows immunity unless the evidence he has is unimpeachable,” Christie noted.

And Christie believes Trump knows it too. The 2024 GOP presidential candidate pointed to a flurry of Trump’s recent gaffes and verbal slipups on the campaign trail as evidence of heightened stress following the news of Meadows’s deal.

“I want all Republican voters to understand this, what’s going to be happening in March,” Christie said. “He’s going to be sitting in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., with Mark Meadows 20 feet away from him, saying, he committed crimes in front of me, on my watch.”

A onetime Trump attorney thinks the former president’s social media addiction might be the end for him in his legal trials.

Throughout October, Trump has been slapped with multiple gag orders for threatening and insulting court staff and witnesses in his various legal cases—though that hasn’t been enough to stop him.

So far, Trump has been fined twice for violating the gag order in his $250 million New York bank fraud trial, but he also faces the real possibility of being jailed if he continues his antics, warned Judge Arthur Engoron.

Meanwhile, in his federal election subversion trial in Washington, D.C., Trump slammed Judge Tanya Chutkan and a potential witness, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, just hours after his gag order was reinstated on Monday. In posts to Truth Social, Trump described Barr as “​​dumb, weak, slow-moving, lethargic, gutless, and lazy.”

That kind of behavior will probably be enough to lock him up, according to Ty Cobb, a former Trump attorney and current partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells.

In an interview with CNN, Cobb argued that the violations in the New York trial, which are a civil matter, aren’t as “consequential” as the criminal conspiracy charges he faces in D.C.

“I think she’ll come in with a much heavier penalty and, ultimately, he’ll spend a night or a weekend in jail,” Cobb said.

“I think it’ll take that to stop it,” he added.

Ty Cobb was a part of the Trump administration legal team from July 2017 until May 2018 and managed matters related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Cobb later described Mueller as an “American hero.”

Cobb has since commented several times on Trump’s ongoing legal woes—in August, the attorney told CNN that the evidence against the former president is “so overwhelming” in the classified documents case, describing it as “tight.” In September, Cobb likened Trump to a “mob boss.”

Ron DeSantis was knocked back on his heels by a new allegation, and his attempts to sidestep the matter failed miserably.

The Republican presidential hopeful has for weeks sparked theories that he’s wearing lifts inside his cowboy boots to make himself appear taller. Internet users and shoe experts alike point to the bizarre fit of DeSantis’s boots and his apparent struggle to walk in them. The Florida governor’s campaign team has vehemently denied the accusations.

But DeSantis was caught flat-footed Monday during an appearance on the PBD Podcast. Host Patrick Bet-David brought up the internet’s theory and showed DeSantis some videos that internet jokesters had edited to show how they thought DeSantis was essentially standing on tiptoes in his boots.

“What are they—I don’t even—I haven’t seen that,” DeSantis said, a little too fast.

Bet-David then produced a pair of flat designer shoes, which he said he had bought for DeSantis so the governor could try them on and prove how tall he is.

“I don’t accept gifts. I can’t accept it,” DeSantis said in an awkward monotone.

If DeSantis and the 1999 Yale baseball roster are to be believed, DeSantis is 5-foot-11. It’s also understandable why he would want to appear tall at all costs. Taller candidates generally (although not always) perform better, but more importantly, DeSantis is facing off against Donald Trump. Trump loves to describe people as “little” as a form of, well, belittlement.

Unfortunately, this could be a massive missed opportunity for DeSantis. If he is shorter, he could embrace his short king status, call Trump out for body-shaming, and seek to prove that good things come in small packages. If the shoe fits, wear it, right?

Instead, whatever he’s doing is just creating an incredibly strange, clown-like effect. As menswear expert Derek Guy wrote in Politico, whether or not he has lifts in his boots, DeSantis is still wearing really terribly fitting boots. Guy spoke with three bootmaking-industry veterans, and all  agreed that DeSantis’s boots are far too wide around his calves. The heels are low and the toes turn up abnormally high. The boots bulge and crease in weird places.

All of these things could be signs that DeSantis simply needs to get his feet re-measured—or that he shoved some lifts into his boots.

House Republicans tacked on a pretty unusual addendum to their aid package for Israel: In exchange for $14.3 billion to the U.S. ally, the GOP wants to cut $14.3 billion from the IRS budget.

The spending cut is not just an unusual addition to an emergency aid package, it will also likely backfire for the party platform as it may very well increase the national deficit. Democrats are expected to reject the bill outright.

The effort, however, underscores exactly how extreme the Republican Party has gotten, particularly under Speaker Mike Johnson’s new leadership.

“We’re going to have to pay for it. We’re not just going to print money and send it overseas,” Johnson told Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany, arguing that standing with the “innocent” in Israel is more aligned with the national interest than “IRS agents.”

As it stands, the bill would gut additional IRS funding allocated in the Inflation Reduction Act. The cuts would target parts of an IRS expansion that include tax enforcement, operations support, free filing for taxpayers, an office of tax policy, and tax court, reported The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein. The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly warned that cutting IRS funding will encourage tax cheating and increase the deficit. The CBO has also estimated that the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion IRS expansion will actually reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion.

“The IRS has recovered over $100 million in unpaid taxes from the wealthy and well-connected in the last month. Yet, in the chaotic world of my Republican colleagues, they view this funding as a never-ending well to promulgate their whims of ‘fiscal responsibility,’ protect billionaires and wealthy corporations, and ultimately, cost taxpayers more,” Representative Richard Neal told Fox News’s Chad Pergram.

Senate leadership also torpedoed the bill, arguing that apart from the unlikely spending cut, Congress should be focusing on passing an all-inclusive emergency aid package for U.S. allies around the globe.

“We believe, our Democratic Caucus, we should be doing all of it together: Israel, Ukraine, South Pacific, etc. And obviously a pay-for like that makes it much harder to pass,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, according to Politico.

House Speaker Mike Johnson turned heads on Monday when a website hosting his podcast and church sermons suddenly vanished. Still, Johnson hasn’t been able to completely scrub his prior social media presence, with some evidence of his lectures still floating around online, including a three-hour sermon organized by his wife’s ministry that blasts the newly elected’s Christian fundamentalism.

The contents of his evangelical musings—which he apparently wants to hide—offer revealing details about the little-known congressman, including that he doesn’t really believe in democracy.

“By the way, the United States is not a democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing,” Johnson said at the First Baptist Church of Haughton, Louisiana, in 2019.

Johnson has also attacked the idea of social services, claiming that the only entity entitled to provide care is the church, not the government.

“I was in South America two weeks ago and they were talking about how … the Catholic Church used to provide soup kitchens and orphanages and do all this stuff and it doesn’t do it anymore and now they’re just willfully, everybody’s willfully, having the civil government take all these responsibilities over. And it’s just a sad development because that’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Johnson said.

In other comments, the Louisiana congressman claimed that the “immigration crisis” is because refugees won’t “assimilate” to the “rule of law”—as in, gaining citizenship—while failing to acknowledge the complicated, lengthy, and expensive process required to become a U.S. citizen. Ultimately, according to Johnson, the failure falls on the refugees’ lack of Christian faith.

“The reason that illegal immigration is such a crisis, such a problem is because you have a lot of God-fearing folks and rule-abiding people who are following the law,” Johnson said, going on to celebrate America’s long history of immigration.

“That’s our origin. But at some point, if the rule of law is eviscerated in that process, the whole system topples. And we’re dangerously close to that right now, because why? We ain’t following the Bible’s rules on this,” Johnson added.

Johnson earned the gavel by a unanimous vote from House Republicans on Wednesday. The resolution came after 22 days of congressional chaos and several failed votes to elect more prominent party members to the role, including Representative Jim Jordan and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who failed to unify the party.