Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took some shots at the White House on Sunday morning when he claimed President Trump’s staff did not serve him well by allowing him to sit down with pro-Trump Fox News host Laura Ingraham for an interview that featured him blasting his political rivals with the Normandy D-Day cemetery as a backdrop.
During a panel discussion on ABC’s This Week, Christie—who served as a Trump surrogate in the 2016 election and was briefly part of the Trump transition team—generally praised the president on his recent overseas visit.
The conversation then pivoted into the debate over Trump lashing out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the Ingraham interview, with Christie noting that the president was reacting to Pelosi reportedly telling Democrats she wanted to see Trump in prison.
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After saying Pelosi “earned” Trump’s wrath due to her comments and claiming there was no excuse for her to say she wanted to see the president jailed, the one-time GOP presidential candidate tossed some criticism the White House’s way.
“I also think that the president’s press staff served him poorly in two instances in Europe,” Christie declared. “Putting him in front of Piers Morgan and putting him in that interview at that site with Laura Ingraham. That doesn’t serve the president well.”
The former governor said that interviews of that nature place the president in trouble because he’s given too much time to speak his mind, and added that it’s the staff’s job “not to put the principal in a situation where you put him at greater risk of harm than greater risk of benefit.”
“I’d argue that when [White House Press Secretary] Sarah Sanders, or whoever made those decisions to put him in those positions--put him there, they ill-served him,” he concluded.
Christie isn't the only conservative pundit who has taken issue with the optics of Trump slamming his political opponents with the grave markers of World War II soldiers serving as a backdrop. CNN’s Amanda Carpenter went off on Trump and Fox News last week, saying she saw “a draft-dodging president” who sat down with a host who “espouses white supremacist talking points while using the graves of World War soldiers who saved the world from Nazis as a prop.”
