Chris Christie has some thoughts about how Kamala Harris can win over the new voters necessary to win in the last stretch before Election Day. But with the stakes so high at this moment, Ana Navarro took him to task for giving Trump a pass.
“You’re spending all this time criticizing Kamala,” Navarro told Christie on Friday’s episode of The View. “We’re doing here what Charlamagne Tha God was talking about yesterday [on CNN]. We are holding her to this high standard of her closing message needs to be this, and this, and this, and that, [when Donald Trump’s] closing message is Arnold Palmer’s package, dancing for 39 minutes like a wackjob, and making fries at McDonald’s.”
Christie insisted that he wasn’t criticizing Harris, telling Navarro to “open her ears,” as he reiterated his view that the voters Harris needs to mobilize are not actually deciding between her and Donald Trump at this point: “They’re either voting for Harris or they’re not voting,” he explained.
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“What the vice president’s doing now should be focused exclusively on closing the deal about why she would be the best president. Saying that Donald Trump is awful and a fascist and all the rest of that—I don’t disagree with any of it—but those people [who believe that] are already sold,” Christie said. “10 days ago, I would’ve told you that she’s gonna win,” he added. But now the former Trump ally-turned-critic is worried.
To make his point, Christie pointed out a few missteps he thinks Harris has made so far, such as not giving a stronger answer on what she would do differently than Biden. “She didn’t say it here [on The View]‚” he said. “I watched you guys that day. When you asked her, ‘What would you do differently than Biden, she didn’t say it. I gotta believe there’s things she disagreed with him on.” Harris doesn’t have to “throw Biden under the bus” to describe “an honest disagreement,” he said.
Trump adviser Jason Miller, meanwhile, thinks Harris’ answer to that question on the daytime talk show “killed her candidacy.”
Christie also said Harris could’ve given the “obvious” answer on the border during her CNN Town Hall this week, which he stated should’ve been, “‘I don’t like the border wall. But you know what, if I have to give the border wall in order to get 1,500 more border patrol agents, to get more money to prosecute transnational gangs, and do those things, I’m willing to do that because that’s what a president does. They don’t get 100 percent of what they want, they compromise.’”
That’s when Navarro chimed in to tell Christie to knock it off. “That sounds like criticism to me,” she said.
Christie responded, “I’m not here to be a cheerleader for her. I’m here to say, based on what I’ve learned in politics over time, what she needs to do to close the deal. She’s got an opportunity to go up—and I don’t think [Trump] does.” Citing John Kelly’s would-be bombshell in the New York Times that Trump admired Hitler, who Trump said “did some good things,” Christie said it’s not likely to move the needle for Harris.
“I think those Republicans have already figured out that they don’t like [Trump], or else—they’re Republicans, they’d be voting for him,” he said. Instead, what will move the needle is “hearing from her.”
