Chris Christie Is Coming for the Presidency

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:46My guest today, Governor Chris Christie, has been the most outspoken GOP candidate so far. He is laying it on Trump, and that's something we need to see. To get on the debate stage, Chris needs 40 ,000 independent donations of just$1. I will be chipping in to help Governor Christie get there and would encourage you to do the same. Whether you're a Republican or Democrat, whether you would vote for Chris or wouldn't vote for Chris, we need someone on stage to tell the truth and put a stop to this nonsense.

1:24So joining us now on Open Book, I'm very proud to have Governor Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a 2024 GOP presidential candidate. He's also the author of Republican Rescue, Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden. So first of all, Governor, friends, a long time. It's great to have you on the show. Congratulations on everything so far. I'm going to go right to the decision to running for president. You said that your wife, Mary Pat, who the Scaramucci family is very fond of, had sort of helped you make that decision.

2:01Take us through that. My wife would castrate me. I just speak publicly. My wife has a castration policy if I run for public office. And so that's obviously not a nonstarter for me. But can you take us through that? Well, you know, it really started, the conversation started in earnest, Anthony, you know, probably last fall as the field started to assemble a little bit. And we kind of were watching what they were up to and how they were speaking and particularly how they were dealing with the issue of Donald Trump running again for president. And as we moved into the winter, Mary Pat continued to say to me, I don't think any of these people are going to have either the guts or the ability to take him on directly.

2:38And he needs to be taken on. And you're the guy who can do it. And in the beginning, I'll tell you, because she was certainly less enthusiastic in 2016 about me running. And this time, she just kept pushing and saying to me, you can't allow him to get away with saying the things and doing the things that he's doing. It's bad for the party. It's bad for the country. You're the one who can prosecute the case against him. So she was a big part, Anthony, of the decision to finally run, I think she's right. And I think the early part of the race has proven she was right. No one else is doing this, but we are, and we're doing it aggressively.

3:11It's a big deal though, Chris. I mean, let's just talk very openly. You've got beautiful kids. I've met your children, parents. It's a big deal. Okay. So go ahead. Take me a little deeper. Take me a little deeper, if you don't mind, because right now you're doing great. You got speaking engagements and television punditry and board seats and you can write books and you are a very popular figure, especially in the North. You're a popular national figure, there's no question. You could win the presidency, knock on wood. I would love to see you as president. Obviously, I'm one of your supporters, but it's a very big deal to go back from being a private citizen with a very high quality of life to undergo what you're about to do.

3:53So give us more color, please. Yeah, look, it's not an easy decision, as you just laid out, for a bunch of reasons. One, the last five years at a public office have been really very good to me, and I've gotten to stay in the public discussion through the stuff I did on ABC News and some paid public speeches I've been able to give over the course of time. Mary Pat and I have spent a lot more time at the Jersey Shore together with our family over the summers, which has been great and really enjoyable to us. And, you know, I've started my own business and we've been successful. So, you know, all those things are things that say, why would you ever want to give most of that up in order to pursue the presidency again?

4:29And it's not an easy decision. And my kids were of mixed feelings about it. I like their mother. My daughters were not very enthusiastic about the idea of doing it again. They're concerned about me. They're concerned about, you know, how the stress and the pressure will affect me and being back in the public limelight. My sons were a little more enthusiastic than my daughters, but still, I think they would have been just as happy if I didn't do it. But in the end, Anthony, you know, if it's in you to believe that the country matters and the things that I've seen happen to our country under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are just things that I couldn't sit by and leave to others to try to fix.

5:05And when I looked at the other candidates, if I had a great degree of confidence in any of the other ones, that they would do it aggressively and the right way, both in terms of campaigning for president and ultimately being president. I probably wouldn't have done it, but I don't have that confidence. And so it's time for me to put up or shut up. And so we're at put up time. OK, that's fair enough. I watched one of your interviews this morning. You said that you and I laughed, actually. You said you were from New Jersey. so you're used to people saying nasty things about you in public. I enjoyed that because I'm from Long Island.

5:38I've been run over by a steamroller, as you know, three or four times. And for whatever reason, it doesn't bother me. So what is it about the water in New Jersey or a place like Long Island that gives us a little bit of that fight and a little bit of that bite, Chris? We're tough, you know, and we grew up with tough people. And we were raised in our case with you and I, Anthony, We were raised by tough parents who weren't given anything in their lives. They had to work for everything they got and were absolutely intent on us having a better life than they did. And guess what? They succeeded. And so, you know, when you have that kind of background, plus, you know, I have a Sicilian mother who, you know, was edgy and tough and didn't take any garbage from anybody.

6:21And that was the example I watched growing up. And so as I got into public life, the interesting thing was she didn't live for very long in my public life only for about two years of my time as U.S. attorney. But even then, if there's anything in the paper that was somewhat negative, this really tough woman would go completely berserk and want to write letters to the editor and all the rest of this, which I had to throw my body in front of to stop her. So it's hard for families to watch this stuff. But I think for me, you know, and for you, it's part of who we are. And I take great pride in the fact that I can take a punch and get up.

6:55I don't like taking a punch. I don't want to kid anybody. Nobody likes But I like the fact that I could take the punch and get back up and start throwing punches of my own. And I've had that a lot of times in my career. And I know I'm going to have that some more over the course of the next 18 months between now and Election Day 2024. So let's get to it. So, Chris, we're in the same camp, obviously. And again, I've given you money and I'm psyched to give you more money. I'm psyched to raise your money. I don't want to help you. We've both known Trump for a long time. I think you said you've known him for 22 years.

7:29I met him personally 17 years ago. Obviously, we both knew about him before we met him because he's been a fixture in our lives for many decades. But tell me about how this shapes up. How do you think when you workshop in your mind a campaign for the presidency going up against Donald Trump, does he survive? Does he survive all these indictments? Does he drop out? Does he stay in the race? His family is decidedly not with him this time, although Melania is tepidly with him. We both saw the special report interview where I sort of felt left out, Chris. He attacked everybody but me. I felt like I was left out, but maybe because I was only there for 11 days, I didn't qualify for the death and destruction rhetoric.

8:12How does it shape out? How do you see this? Look, he's the frontrunner, Anthony, and he's a frontrunner by, you know, double digits, big double digits, 20, 30 points. And so I don't understand how you can game this out any other way, but having to take him on directly and go after him. There's one lane, it seems to me, to the Republican nomination for president. He's at the front of that lane. So to do it, you have to go through him. My instinct tells me, knowing him all these years, that he does not drop out, that no matter what happens, he would not be able to survive the idea of dropping out of this race voluntarily.

8:48I think he's going to have to be defeated at the polls in Republican primaries. I do think that if he loses one or two, he then will drop out. He can't take losing, as you know. that's the whole basis of this denying that the 2020 election actually happened the way it did, because he just can't bear the idea that we call the loser. But he is a loser. He lost in 2018 when, you know, the House of Representatives, when he was the leader of the party. He lost the White House and the Senate in 2020. He lost two more governor seats in 2022 and another Senate seat. And so here we are as a loser party now for the last six years under his leadership.

9:25So I think he wants to try to reverse that. But if he gets the sense early on in the primary season, let's say, Anthony, he were to lose Iowa and New Hampshire, I think he gets out because I think he can't bear the idea of the beating that would come after that. So I think he'd say something like, the country doesn't deserve me. The elections were rigged. I don't need this. And I'm going back to Mar-a-Lago. But unless he gets defeated at the polls, I don't think he ever drops out voluntarily, no matter how many cases are brought against him. Okay. So let's talk about beating him then. So now, you know, and we both know the Republican parties' primaries are front loaded.

10:00It's a winner take all primary system. You've got about six weeks really to beat him. Obviously you have this and, and, and beginning of the year, but once you get into 2024, January, you know, you've got about six or seven weeks. So I have my thinking right. Is that a correct analysis or? It is. It is. Look, all this time's going to matter. Yeah. Yeah. So how do we do it? The way we do it is we start as we have right now, the last two weeks of the campaign, our first two weeks, we've been going right at them and going at them strong. And you get a lot of attention when you do that. And that's what you need.

10:34The American people are not focusing on the presidential race right now, as you know, guys like you and I are focusing on it, but the American people aren't focusing on it. And so it's going to take enormous amount of repetition over the next six months to get into their psyche. And once we get past Christmas, then everybody will be paying attention to it. And that's when you have to lay it on even harder. But hopefully you've laid the foundation in these six months. And then in these last six weeks, I think, you know, we don't know what's going to happen with this cases, et cetera. So you can't talk about exactly every issue you're going to bring up.

11:05But you have to talk about how he was a failure as a president, how he failed on the promises that he gave to us, whether it was to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it or repeal and replace Obamacare, balance the budget in four years. These are all things that he said he was going to do, fix the immigration system. He didn't do any of it. And a lot of Republicans know that our agenda is not safe in his hands because he doesn't really care about an agenda. What he cares about is power for himself and retribution now against those who he thinks have done him wrong. That doesn't seem to be the great basis for a presidency.

11:37And that's the case we'll be making. So I think that's the way to do it. And as you know, he'll give us plenty of opportunities for additional points to make every time he opens his mouth. You know, you're very well liked in the blue collar community. You know, my father-in-law, who unfortunately is no longer with us, was a huge fan of yours. President Trump is also well liked in that community. And you identified something, he identified something. There's a forgotten group of people, Governor Christie, where they were once blue collar and economically aspirational, but now they're blue collar and they feel economically desperational.

12:15In your case, however, though, I see you as somebody that can come up with policies to help them. President Trump has been an avatar for their anger, certainly, but he never came up with any policies to help them. So explain to us what differentiates you and explain to us what you would do in your first 100 days in office to help these people. Well, a few things. First off, Anthony, I think you're right that he's tied into their anger and that gives them some comfort, but it doesn't give them any relief. In the end, we need to give them the kind of relief that they need. So what do you do? First off, you got to get inflation under control.

12:49It is the biggest invisible tax that these folks pay every time they go to a store. And the way to do that, in my view, is to bring government spending down. So in the first 100 days, you have to propose a budget that is going to bring significantly under control on the federal budget. And that's going to be a fight with the Congress, depending upon who controls the Congress. But it's a fight that you have to have because you have to send a signal to the markets, something that you know better than I, that this inflationary period is going to go away. As that goes away, rates go down, more investment in business, more investment in job creation will help the middle class in this country.

13:21Second, I think that parents are incredibly frustrated about the educational system in our country, not only the college system, but the K-12 system. So one of the things I want to do very early on is propose a federal tax credit for school choice so that parents can send their kids to a parochial school, a private school, if they want to, and not have to worry about whether they have the wherewithal to afford it. And you and I have been fortunate enough that we can make those decisions for our kids to send them to the very best place, whether it's public, private or parochial. A lot of parents in this country don't have it.

13:52We need to give them that relief so that they can feel like, again, like our parents felt, that they were giving us an opportunity for a greater life. And they knew education was the way to do that. You went to one of the finest educational institutions, higher education in the country. And so that opportunity for parents like yours to see their son go to an Ivy League school and be able to build a career off that, it takes away a lot of that anger, Anthony, that you're talking about. Third, I'd say that we need to fix the immigration system in the country. People need to know that the immigration system works and it's fair that the people who can bring great value to this country are being let in based upon their merit and that the border in the South is closed for two reasons.

14:32One, because it's unfair to everyone who's waiting in an illegal way to come in. But secondly, and more importantly, the amount of fentanyl that's coming in over the southern border, Anthony, is obscene. Manufactured in China, sent to the cartels in Mexico, and that brought up to this country. 110 ,000 overdose deaths last year. It's now the leading cause of death in young men between 18 and 34 in this country. I'd send the National Guard down there in the first 100 days to assist our border patrol officers to interdict that fentanyl. and to try to prevent as much of it as we can from coming into the country.

15:06And I'd couple with that a much more aggressive program, Anthony, on treatment and drug treatment in our country so that people who need the treatment can get it. We're not going to solve this problem by jailing drug addicts. Drug dealers definitely should go to jail, the ones who are profiting off of it. But the addicts need to get treated. It's a disease just like heart disease or cancer or diabetes. They need to be treated and can be treated. and we need to save lives. And so those are examples of things I would try to get rolling in the first hundred days to accomplish on behalf of the country.

15:39Well, you know, listen, it's obviously it's a great plan. It's great policies that I believe in, Chris. I want to ask you about the other side, though, because I'll say this rhetorically, I didn't think we were going to grow up. You and I are roughly the same age. Didn't think we were going to grow up in a society that was this polarized. I sort of remember more comity and get along this, if you will, in the body politic when we were growing up. Maybe that's not the case, but it certainly seemed like that. Correct me if I'm wrong, because you're more of a student of this than that. But how do you get your policies done in an environment like this, where people are at each other's throats in Washington or on the airwaves, on cable, in the streets, on social media?

16:21How do we do it, Chris? Well, that's one of the things I think, Anthony, that differentiates me from the other candidates. You know, our other candidates are basically red state candidates who have operated either as governors or as senators in states that are dominated by the Republican Party. And so they had an easy time, for the most part, getting their policies through. Everybody agreed. That's not the atmosphere in Washington, as you know. It was not the atmosphere for eight years when I was in Trenton in the state capital of New Jersey, where I had a Democratic legislature for all eight years.

16:52So I had to learn how to use the bully pulpit, how to use public and private persuasion to bring people along to do things like we did in New Jersey. Pension reform against the public sector union's opposition. Health benefit reform, again, against the public sector union opposition. Firing the Camden Police Department because they were wholly ineffective. Bringing in a new police force and training them in a new way, which now has led to a 75 % drop in the murder rate in the city of Camden. These are the kind of things that we were able to accomplish in a bipartisan way. And so I think, one, you have somebody who knows how to do that, knows how to work with the other side to accomplish things.

17:28Secondly, I think it also is about the rhetoric you use. You know, you know me, I'm tough. I will fight and I'll throw a punch whenever I need to. But we need to get back in Washington, D.C. to the idea that we're all set there for a reason. And that reason is to accomplish something that makes the country better for the people who live here. and you know that's the kind of desire i would bring to the job is to every day look for ways that we could work together i won't abandon my principles but what i will do is not call someone who agrees with me 80 of the time my 20 enemy they'd be my 80 friend and that's the way you have to look at it and that's the way i'd go about it and i hope that by getting rid of some of this Trump-induced chaos and vitriol and this constantly looking back and whining and moaning and complaining about the way he was mistreated, that'll bring everybody's anger down.

18:20We'll still disagree, Anthony, but you remember, I think what you and I are thinking back on is times when you could sit at a dinner party or a cocktail party and disagree with people about politics, but not have it in the evening. Now, you have any of that kind of disagreement. People are so on edge and so angry and feeling aggrieved that it can end the dinner party, end the cocktail party where people just storm out and won't talk to each other. I think showing people that government can get something done will bring that temperature down. So what does he do? The real leadership question. Okay.

18:51I think about this often in my own life. Okay. And I have my list. Are there things that you could have handled differently or better? And if so, what were they? A number of things. if I had to do all over again. There's a law in New Jersey, I think, that allows retired police officers and firefighters and other public sector workers to get paid at the end of their careers for their sick time, unused sick time. So I always thought the benefit of having paid sick time was if you got sick, you'd still get paid. But these men and women would bank it and then get checks for a quarter of a million dollars, 300,$400 ,000 at the end of their careers on the taxpayer.

19:32I went, I railed against this as governor and I got a bill to my desk that would have capped those payments at$15 ,000. And I wanted it to be zero. And I vetoed the bill and I never got another bill back. And I could have capped this thing at 15 instead today. Now, nine years later, they're still getting these huge checks. It was a mistake. And what it taught me was a bigger lesson, which is that, you know, if you can get two thirds of a loaf, you should take it and live to fight another day. Then you're only fighting between the difference between 15 ,000 and zero, not between unlimited and zero.

20:04On the George Washington Bridge matter, there's no doubt that the mistake I made there was some of the people that I picked to be over at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And I made bad judgments there. And, you know, personnel is policy. And people there disappointed me. And I learned a very important lesson in that, which is that there is no insignificant job that you give to anybody when you're in a position like governor or president. And so I'd be much, much even more discerning than I was before because of that experience and everything that it cost me and it cost the people of our state to have people go off on a fraternity prank at the George Washington Bridge.

20:46And it's wasted a lot of time and a lot of energy for everybody because of what they did. But the last thing I'd say is that there were moments where, when I was younger in public, I said some things that I probably shouldn't have said, used some adjectives that I shouldn't have used. And, you know, it's part of who I am and my nature. As you said before, I'm very direct. But I also think that as you get older, you realize there are other words you can use to be just as direct and just as blunt without being nearly as crass or insulting. And I think I've changed in that over the last five to six years as well.

21:21So there's some things that I would do differently if I had a chance to do it all over again. And maybe I will with the presidency. What do you wish you went a little harder at? Say, wow, I had that in my fingertips. I should have pushed harder. Look, I think that if I had to do that all over again and pushed a little bit harder for stuff, I would have pushed even harder for reducing more tax rates in the state. New Jersey is so difficult, as you know, from a tax perspective for the people who live there. And I got a cap on property taxes. We eliminated the estate tax. We reduced the sales tax.

21:54We did some good things, but we never were able to get anything done on the income tax. And I think I wish I'd gone harder on the income tax than I did. I tried it a number of times, but I probably could have spent more political capital on that if I had thought even harder about it. I think also I would have started on the drug treatment issue sooner, Anthony. I think in the beginning, I had more of a prosecutor's bent towards it and an enforcement bent. But the longer I worked on that issue, the more I understood that treatment was really important. And we made great strides in the last three years of my administration.

22:26But I wish I would have spent eight years in that regard. We would have made even more progress and probably saved more lives. You know, I appreciate you answering these questions with such candor, because I do believe and I know you believe this as well, that good leadership requires that level of self accountability. a lot of times you hear somebody say, I've never made any mistakes, as Mr. Trump is want to do, then you know you're in trouble because, you know, you'll enjoy this governor. I was with him when Mike Bloomberg called him and to congratulate him on the presidency. Obviously, Mike was with Hillary Clinton and he says to President Trump, I just want you to go out and hire the best people.

23:01And you know what Trump says to him? I actually don't need to do that. You know why, Mike? I'm the smartest person. I'm the best person. I don't need to do that. And that was heard by like five or six people that were in the room. So it's not like I'm, as Trump says, he can say fake news all he wants, but people heard it and saw it. It is what it is. All right. We're down to the last few minutes here. So I have five words. I'm going to read out the words, Governor. You give me your reaction to the word. It could be a word. It could be a sentence. Ready? Let's start with Vice President Pence. Nice guy.