Christie predicts Trump will be a ‘felon’ by the spring
2024 GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie predicted former President Trump will be a convicted felon by spring 2024.
In an interview Thursday on CNN’s “The Lead” with Jake Tapper, Christie suggested America’s founding fathers would never had predicted a convicted felon could run for the presidency. If they had, Christie argued, they would have specifically banned felons from the presidency.
In a discussion about Trump’s top two GOP rivals — former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — Christie recalled a question posed by moderators in the first debate.
“Remember, both of them raised their hand on the stage in the first debate and said they would support [Trump] even if he’s a convicted felon. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin are rolling in their graves,” Christie said.
“If they knew that anyone would have had the audacity, as a felon — which Donald Trump will be, come this spring — to run for president, and that other people running for the office would be willing to support someone like that, they would have added, ‘You can’t be a convicted felon,’ to ‘age 35’ and ‘natural-born American citizen,’ as requirements for the presidency.”
Christie, the former New Jersey governor, continued to slam Haley and DeSantis for their willingness to support Trump, who has been indicted in four separate criminal cases, comprising a total of 91 felony counts.
The charges relate to a range of alleged crimes, including trying to overturn the results of the election, willfully retaining national security secrets and falsifying business records in connection to alleged hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election.
“To say that you could be the rightful heir of the legacy of Washington and Adams and Lincoln and FDR, as someone who’d say I will support a convicted felon, that gives me grave concerns, Jake, about their judgment and whether it’s just nothing more than craven politics,” he said.
Christie said he was “not ready to make that call yet” when asked whether Haley or DeSantis would make a better president. He said hearing Haley say that Trump was the right president for the right time during the most recent debate was “really very discouraging to me.”
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