'Disgraceful': Chris Christie slams Trump for his 'awful week'

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at the Republican Jewish Coalition's 2023 Annual Leadership Summit at the Venetian Convention & Expo Center in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 28, 2023 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

During the 2024 GOP presidential primary, most of the candidates — from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to businessman Vivek Ramaswamy — offered only tepid criticism of frontrunner Donald Trump. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley ramped up her criticism of Trump near the end of her campaign but ended up endorsing him during her speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

One candidate, however, was consistently scathing in his attacks on Trump: former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. And 11 months into Trump's second presidency, Christie didn't hold back during a Sunday, December 21 roundtable discussion on ABC News' "This Week."

When host Jonathan Karl noted that "even by Trump standards, this was an erratic, chaotic week," Christie sarcastically responded, "Merry Christmas to you, too, Mr. President."

The two-term former New Jersey governor continued, "Look, this is a pretty strange week. Just think about it: He sends out that disgraceful post on the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele. Then, he puts his name on the building named after an assassinated president. Then, he gives a frenetic national TV speech filled with inaccuracies, and really sounded like he was yelling at the American people that they don't get how great he's done so far. And then, he puts these plaques out underneath the presidential pictures he's put on the colonnade, filled with things that you could tell just from reading that he wrote them himself."

The "assassinated president" Christie was referring to was John F. Kennedy, uncle of Trump's Health and Human Services director, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In Washington, D.C., the Kennedy Center for the Performing Artists was named after JFK when it opened in 1971. Now, in late 2025, Trump wants to rename it "The Trump Center."

"Look, he does all of this, Jon, in a week where 60 percent of the people in the country say the economy is no better under him than it was under Joe Biden," Christie told Karl and others. "The war continues to rage on in Ukraine that he said he was going to settle in 24 hours. And (Russian President Vladimir) Putin continues to manipulate him to deteriorate the 80-year NATO alliance. And twice now, in the past month, you've seen Republicans break from him on Capitol Hill, on both the Epstein files and ACA subsidies, to sign discharge petitions to repute both the speaker and the president."

Christie continued, "It's not a strange week, Jon, it's an awful week. And the president better wake up to the fact that going to Rocky Mount, North Carolina (to deliver a speech), is not going to solve his problems — and that he better start solving the American peoples' problems, or our party is going to have a big problem come November."

From Your Site Articles