Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is expected to announce his entry into the 2024 Republican presidential primary as soon as next week, according to multiple reports.
Christie is expected to formally enter the race next Tuesday, June 6, during a town hall discussion held at Saint Anselm College, a liberal arts school in New Hampshire.
The former governor plans on running “a non-traditional campaign that is highly focused on earned media, mixing it up in the news cycle and engaging Trump,” one adviser told Axios on Wednesday morning. “Will not be geographic dependent, but nimble.”
Christie previously made a Republican presidential run back in 2016, squaring off against Donald Trump, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush, as well as Senators Marco Rubio (R., Fl.), and Ted Cruz (R., Tex.), among others.
Mike Duhaime, a political strategist who worked with Christie in 2016, is expected to return to the campaign trail alongside former White House communications director, turned vocal Trump critic, Anthony Scaramucci.
Christie, himself, was a former Trump ally who has become increasingly outspoken against the former president, publicly breaking with him in November 2020 following reports that the president was questioning the legitimacy of the election. “We heard nothing today about any evidence,” Christie told ABC News at the time. “This kind of thing, all it does is inflame without informing. And we cannot permit inflammation without information.”
During a CNN town hall in early May, Christie called Trump a “coward” and a “puppet of Putin” following his remarks equivocating over whether Russia should lose the war. “If you don’t say that you think Ukraine should win the war, I don’t know where you stand with Putin,” Christie said.
The former governor, who many see as a dark horse candidate, has also begun to take shots at Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who announced his candidacy last week.
“Where are we headed here now that, if you express disagreement in this country, the government is allowed to punish you? To me, that’s what I always thought liberals did. And now all of a sudden here we are participating in this with a Republican governor,” Christie said, referencing DeSantis’s efforts to punish Disney for speaking out against his Parental Rights in Education Law.
DeSantis responded to Republican critics of his scrap with Disney during his campaign kickoff speech in Iowa Tuesday night, declaring “there will be no compromise” on the issue.
Brian Jones, a former advisor for both John McCain and Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bids in 2008 and 2012, respectively, is expected to head up Christie’s super PAC, Tell It Like It Is.
Christie “is willing to confront the hard truths that currently threaten the future of the Republican Party,” Jones told the New York Times in a statement published on Tuesday. “Now more than ever we need leaders that have the courage to say not what we want to hear but what we need to hear.”