Chris Christie Apologizes for Previously Backing Trump, Who He Now Believes Will “Burn America to the Ground”

GOP presidential hopeful Chris Christie released a new ad on Thursday in which he attempted to make amends for what he appears to believe was the worst mistake of his political career: supporting Donald Trump in 2016.

Yes, just a few short months after telling Vanity Fair’s Chris Smith, “I don’t make any…apologies for that period of time,” i.e., the period when he was fully aboard Team Trump, the former New Jersey governor declared: “Well, I was wrong. I made a mistake. And now, we’re confronted with the very same choice again. Donald Trump is ahead in the polls, and so everyone says anyone who’s behind him should drop out, and we should make our choice Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. Well, Joe Biden has had the wrong policies, and Donald Trump will sell the soul of this country. Neither choice is acceptable to me, and it shouldn’t be acceptable to you.”

One of the weird things about Christie’s mea culpa is that he apparently thinks someone who has “the wrong policies” is as equally dangerous as someone who “will sell the soul of this country,” who he has called a “dictator,” and who he said last week would “burn America to the ground.” (In his interview with Vanity Fair, Christie said he won’t vote in the general election if the choice is between Biden and Trump.)

The other weird thing is that you might come away from the clip thinking that the former governor realized the error of his ways shortly after 2016, or at least just after Trump became president—when, in fact, he was still supporting the guy in 2020 and did debate prep for the campaign that, as of a year later, he was saying he didn’t regret.

Of course, Christie coming around to the fact that he f–ked up, albeit many years after he should have, is better than not coming around at all. Which has been the case for other GOP hopefuls like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, both of whom have said they would pardon the ex-president if he is convicted of one of the many federal crimes he’s been charged with (and pleaded not guilty to).