Chris Christie slams GOP debate pledge as a ‘useless idea’ as he doubles down on plans to take on ‘loser, loser, loser’ Trump

Chris Christie became the latest Republican to publicly trash the decisions of his party’s leadership this week when he laid into the pledge that GOP bigwigs are requiring participants in the 2024 debate cycle to sign.

Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, the ex-New Jersey governor seemed to indicate that he had signed the pledge — which states that any participant in the GOP debates will support the party’s eventual nominee — merely in order to make it onstage, while alluding to the idea that he would not hesitate to break it.

“I’ll take the pledge in 2024 just as seriously as Donald Trump took it in 2016,” said Mr Christie.

He also derided the loyalty pledge itself as a “bad idea”, adding that he had voiced his displeasure to GOP party chair Ronna McDaniel.

“It’s only in the era of Donald Trump that you need somebody to sign something on a pledge,” he quipped.

The loyalty pledge follows a massive fracture of GOP unity in 2016 which left the wing of the party headed by Donald Trump largely in control. Ever since, that wing of the party has sought to quell rebellious elements of the longtime Republican establishment who refused to vocally support Mr Trump in 2016 and 2020, with limited success.

Mr Trump himself has enforced his own loyalty test on Republican candidates up and down the ballot for years. Most recently in the 2022 midterm elections, the ex-president threw his support most firmly behind those Republicans who supported his falsehoods about the 2020 election and denied that support for those who didn’t — even going as far as propping up primary challenges against his remaining critics in the GOP.

Those efforts have led to a continued rightward shift in the party but were also blamed for the GOP’s unsatisfying performance in the midterm contests, where the party lost ground in the Senate and barely eked out a slim House majority.

Mr Christie, who prepped his now-rival for debates in 2020, has been particularly critical of the ground lost by his party under the former president’s watch, and hammered that issue on Sunday in his interview with CNN. Dubbing Mr Trump a “three-time loser”, the ex-governor laid the blame squarely at the twice-indicted former president’s feet for “the worst midterm performance we have seen in a long, long time”.

He has signaled that the GOP’s electoral outlook will be a central part of his argument against Mr Trump as they both pursue the Republican nomination for president. At a CNN town hall earlier this month, he also held Mr Trump responsible for the defeat of the GOP in the 2018 midterm elections, which led to control of the House returning to Democratic hands.

“He hasn’t won a damn thing since 2016. Three-time loser,” the former governor declared. “Loser. Loser. Loser. Now we’re going, ‘It’ll be different this time.’ Why? Why will it be different this time?”