Christie takes his anti-Trump slingshot to N.H.

DERRY, N.H. — Chris Christie brought his Talking Truth to Donald Trump performance back to New Hampshire on Wednesday evening, aiming a fresh quiver of poison darts at the former president. His talk pleased a small Trump-skeptical crowd, but raised the big question about Christie’s candidacy: Where are all the other Republican voters?

For the most part, Christie was preaching to the choir. Submitting to more than 90 minutes of questions in a town hall format, he heard from an audience member who identified as a member of an extinct species, a “Rockefeller Republican”; from another who said he used to work for a Republican senator but hasn’t voted Republican since 2016; and from a woman who introduced herself by saying, “I’m a Democrat, and you intrigue me.”

At times the linoleum-floored room in a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Derry, with its circle of white folding chairs, took on the feeling of a therapy session for Republicans homeless in their party. “What in your opinion,” asked one man, “happened to the Republican Party? We know that Trump lied about the election, but why did so many of our fellow citizens believe that?”

Since announcing his campaign two weeks ago, Christie has had a modest lift in early public polls of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, nudging into third place, though still far behind Trump, the front-runner. At the same time, Christie, who has positioned himself as Trump’s most direct critic, tops the list of 2024 candidates that Republicans say they will never consider.

Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who was an early Trump endorser in 2016 and stuck with him in 2020, presented himself Wednesday as the lone truth-teller in the GOP field — criticizing Trump as unfit for office, while mocking other primary rivals as too cowed to even challenge the former president’s lies about the 2020 election.