Chris Christie waged a battle with a Trump-loving audience at the Florida Freedom Summit, slamming the crowd for being afraid of the truth and detached from reality.
The former New Jersey governor was greeted with boos at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Kissimmee outside Orlando on Saturday.
Mr Christie, who’s waging what’s seen by many as a doomed campaign to take down Mr Trump, faced the audience’s wrath immediately after entering the stage, with the booing continuing throughout his 15-minute speech, according to CBS News.
“Your anger against the truth is reprehensible,” he told the crowd. “The problem is you want to shout down any voice that says anything different than what you want to hear.”
“You can go and boo about it as much as you like, but it doesn’t change the truth and the truth is coming,” he added.
“What a shock, you’re for Trump. I’m going to fall over dead. The problem is you fear the truth,” Mr Christie said.
“I assume that you’re yelling for $33 trillion in debt,” he told the audience. “It must be one of the things you’re for. You’re probably for it. Because you won’t be here to pay for it. But our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be here to pay for it.”
Discussing Mr Christie’s fight with the crowd, CNN anchor Jim Acosta noted to political commentator Ana Navarro that it’s “not good when you’re yelling at the audience and calling them reprehensible”.
“Well, it’s Chris Christie, right, so from New Jersey. I think he’s used to yelling at the audience and being yelled at [by] the audience,” Ms Navarro said.
“Look, Chris Christie is at single digits, what, two, three per cent at best,” she added. “So obviously, this is not about him winning the nomination, but I do think he’s trying to cement his place in history, maybe as being one of the Republicans that did speak sense and did speak sanity and did speak truth and did confront Donald Trump and the cult.”
“So there’s a lot of things that might not be all that good that are going to be in his obituary, this is one of the good things that’s going to be in his obituary. Republican nominee in 2024 is not going to be one,” she noted.
“I don’t think Chris Christie is a hero by any stretch of the imagination,” Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast told Mr Acosta. “And I think that if Trump were to become president again, Chris Christie would desperately beg for a job in that cabinet, as we’ve seen before. I mean, remember, Trump gave Chris Christie Covid.”
“I don’t actually give Chris Christie all that much credit,” she added. “I think he’s trying to get a television contributorship. I think he’s trying to grow his brand. I think he knows that he’s kind of irrelevant. He hasn’t held an elected position in a long time.”
“Until this run, he’s really been on the wrong side of history,” she said.
