Former New Jersey Governor and GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie spoke at the Florida Freedom Summit in Kissimee, Florida, on Saturday.
Safe to say, it did not go well. The audience showed it was not in a receptive mood to hear from him.
Right from the start of his speech, he was met by boos and calls for “Trump!” and “Drop out now!” Christie has been a critic of former President Donald Trump, who is the leader in the Republican primary. Christie’s numbers have not risen out of the low single digits, but he’s continued to primarily criticize Trump during debates and in interviews. He’s even claimed that Joe Biden did better than Trump in regard to Ukraine.
Instead of listening to the opinion of the crowd, Christie decided to chastise them for their support of Trump and present what he claimed was the “truth” as they continued to boo him.
“What a shock, you’re for Trump, I’m gonna fall over dead,” he said. “Now look, every one of those boos, every one of those catcalls, every one of those yells will not solve one problem we face in this country.”
“Your anger, your anger, your anger against the truth is reprehensible,” Christie said.
“As people watch today, if your arguments are so strong, if your arguments are so great and mine are so bad, then just keep quiet. Let me make my awful arguments, and then you can just reject them outta hand. But the problem is you fear the truth. The problem is you wanna shout down any voice that says anything different than what you want to hear.”
Christie claimed that the booing didn’t “bother him.”
Some opined that the strategy of calling a Republican audience “reprehensible” in the Republican primary might not be a good idea.
Treating Republican voters with disdain while running in the Republican primary is a very odd strategy… https://t.co/mUjRNcp34q
— Garrett Ventry (@GarrettVentry) November 4, 2023
Members in the audience responded to being called “reprehensible” by yelling out things like “Bridgegate!” when he spoke about “pettiness” and such things being “beneath’ the process of selecting a president.
When people are bringing up old scandals, it’s never a good thing.
“Bridgegate” is the incident where Christie and aides were accused of shutting down lanes at the George Washington Bridge to make trouble for the mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing Christie in his 2013 re-election campaign.
Christie then posted the comments he made at the Florida Freedom Summit, repeated some of what he had said criticizing Trump supporters, and asked for donations of a dollar to help his campaign.
But most of the responses were also critical, so it didn’t exactly have the effect he wanted, with many echoing some of the same thoughts expressed by the people at the event.
