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Former Gov. Chris Christie is running for president, but by all appearances, his party’s 2024 nomination is not the only thing the New Jersey Republican wants. Christie seems equally focused on a related goal: infuriating Donald Trump.
There’s reason to believe the former governor is succeeding.
In theory, the former president should feel free to ignore Christie. According to the latest data from FiveThirtyEight, Trump is cruising to the GOP nomination, leading the crowded field with nearly 54% support. Christie, meanwhile, is in seventh place, with roughly 2.6% support. Common sense suggests the former need not pay attention to the latter.
And yet Trump talks about his former ally a lot, both on the campaign trail — the "fat pig" rhetoric this week was unusually ugly — and on the former president’s social media platform. Indeed, just last night the 2024 frontrunner wrote a missive that read in part:
“Reported that Sloppy Chris Christie said I only built 50 Miles of Wall on the Southern Border. Wrong! I built almost 500 Miles of Wall, including the fact that some very dilapidated areas had to be completely demolished with new Wall then built. He knows this but keeps repeating the lies. ... Loser!”
For those who don’t watch the Republican candidates closely, it's worth appreciating the fact that this back-and-forth fight has been ongoing for a while. Christie has mocked Trump for failing to erect a significant amount of new border barriers, only to have the former president lash out furiously in response. This, naturally, has led Christie to keep needling Trump — he knows he’s touched a nerve — which in turn has generated more hysterics from the former president.
Last night’s missive, in other words, is part of a pattern, which Trump seems eager to extend.
The problem for the former president — one of them, anyway — is that Christie has the facts on his side. In May, after Trump boasted that he “built hundreds of miles of wall” and “finished” the project, The New York Times explained:
The Trump administration constructed 453 miles of border wall over four years, and a vast majority of the new barriers reinforced or replaced existing structures. Of that, about 47 miles were new primary barriers. The United States’ southwestern border with Mexico is over 1,900 miles, and during his campaign, Mr. Trump had vowed to build a wall across the entire border and make Mexico pay for it. Mexico did not pay for the barriers that had been constructed.
Just so we’re all clear, the entire border wall project was a rather embarrassing failure. I realize that the GOP’s presidential contenders — including Christie, who used to know better — are promising to pick up where Trump left off, but that’s a tough position to defend as a substantive matter: The misguided idea simply didn’t work.
But if we’re going to have a conversation about it anyway, we should at least rely on accurate details. Christie keeps saying that the Trump administration only managed to add roughly 47 miles’ worth of new border barriers, while Trump keeps saying “the actual number is 463 Miles.”
The actual number is 47 miles. The more the former president pushed back against Christie, the more frequently we're reminded of the fact that Christie’s claim is true.