Chris Christie is going to tell Republicans at the debate that the 2020 election was not stolen.
Will MAGA listen? Of course not! MAGA’s self-identity is too enmeshed in their the lies and deceit their Orange Messiah and their echo chamber have told them. But it’s important because for the Republican Party to become a semi-normal political party again, it must rejoin reality and face The Big Lie head on.
A former Republican Party operative who left in 2016 after being in the party for over 30 years told me not too long ago that 10-20% of the party used to be crazy. They’d be the people grumbling at the back of the room. Now the crazies are 50-60% of the party, and are often running things at the local or even state level. For the Republican Party to become viable again amongst swing voters, that percentage has to go down appreciably.
Will MAGA listen? Of course not! MAGA’s self-identity is too enmeshed in their the lies and deceit their Orange Messiah and their echo chamber have told them. But it’s important because for the Republican Party to become a semi-normal political party again, it must rejoin reality and face The Big Lie head on.
A former Republican Party operative who left in 2016 after being in the party for over 30 years told me not too long ago that 10-20% of the party used to be crazy. They’d be the people grumbling at the back of the room. Now the crazies are 50-60% of the party, and are often running things at the local or even state level. For the Republican Party to become viable again amongst swing voters, that percentage has to go down appreciably.
Chris Christie is ready to tell GOP voters on August 23 that former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. God bless him, as President Joe Biden likes to say, and God bless the (probably mostly) Democrats who sent the former New Jersey governor enough small checks to get him to the debate stage so that he can tell this truth.
Christie is going to hammer Trump, in absentia, about everything. And he will hammer the other candidates about Trump. We expect those who have qualified for the debate to have readied their January 6th spin: It wasn’t an insurrection, but violence is never right, but many patriots were expressing heartfelt concerns, etc.
But of course, without the Big Lie, no one would have attacked the Capitol. And Trump wouldn’t have been indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election. Polling now shows the majority of Republican voters who were led astray by Trump’s malignant fiction has grown even larger.
And now Ron DeSantis seems suddenly to agree with Christie. This kind of thing can happen when you feel you have nothing left to lose. The other candidates may not feel as desperate as the Florida governor. Will they agree?