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      Who’s Running in the Republican Presidential Primary?

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      Whenever I want to put myself to sleep at night, I run through the names of all the former vice presidents. OK, sorta peculiar. It might be time for a break. Maybe I’ll just try making a list of Republican candidates for president.Back when Donald Trump announced it all seemed sorta life-as-usual, but now the race is definitely on. There are currently somewhere between 12 and 400 Republicans eyeing the White House.All the major names are men except Nikki Haley, who’s arguing that “it’s time to put a badass woman in the White House.” Well, yeah. There’s very little chance Haley’s campaign is going anywhere, but I think we can all agree she could really perk things up.We’re also expecting some energy from the newly announced candidate Chris Christie. Rather than dodging the whole Donald Trump matter whenever possible, Christie stresses that he’s running to save the country from a former close colleague who he now calls a “lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog.”And that’s just the beginning! On Wednesday we acquired Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. His great claim to fame is having built a software company that he sold for over $1 billion. Warning: Do not call Burgum a billionaire. (“Not even close!”) He’s really not into that. You’ll hurt his feelings.Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t have that problem since he’s reportedly worth only $600 million or so (biopharmaceuticals). Still, he’s invested at least $10 million in the race so far and it’s gotten … well, hey, we’re talking about him.Ramaswamy, who’s 37, went to Harvard around the same time as Pete Buttigieg and has claimed that Buttigieg is “like the Diet Coke to my Coca-Cola.” Where do you think he came up with that one? Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.OK, and let’s see … there’s Perry Johnson. Ever heard of Perry Johnson? He did run for governor of Michigan last year but got thrown off the Republican primary ballot for invalid petition signatures. Which must have been a little embarrassing for someone who made his fortune building a firm that promises to help your company meet business quality standards.Johnson used a pinch of his money running an ad during the Super Bowl celebrating, um, himself. (“Perry Johnson: Quality guru. Governor for a perfect Michigan.”) Fans who lost interest in the game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals were free to contemplate the suggestion that they give thanks to Johnson “when your car door closes just right.”Didn’t work. But they do say he’s a really great bridge player. Just remember him that way. Perry Johnson … I bid two no-trump.You don’t need any previous government experience in your bio to be on the campaign trail. Ryan Binkley of Texas is out meeting and greeting in Iowa, and he’s never done anything remotely like this before. Although he claims he started thinking about running for president around eight years ago. So it’s not like he hasn’t been mulling.Binkley bills himself as a pastor and — wait for the shock — super fiscal conservative. He’s also the chief executive and co-founder of Generational Group, an investment banking firm that specializes in mergers and acquisitions.Are you picking up on a theme here, people? We have a very crowded field of superrich candidates. (Don’t call them billionaires!) And while sitting on piles of cash will not necessarily make you president, it sure does help open a lot of doors.There actually are some candidates who don’t seem to have a ton of money. We haven’t gotten to Larry Elder, a California talk radio host who did very well against other Republicans in the Gov. Gavin Newsom recall election. Which was certainly a great triumph for Elder except for the part about Newsom beating the entire recall idea back by huge margins.Or Asa Hutchinson, the 72-year-old former governor of Arkansas. OK, not necessarily a new broom. But you will so impress your friends when you say, “… And let’s not forget about Asa Hutchinson.”I guess Senator Tim Scott really ought to be up higher. He is the best known Black candidate in the field so far and he is having adventures. Got into a fight on TV over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, much to the audience’s irritation. (“Do not boo. This is ‘The View,’” urged Whoopi Goldberg.)Mike Pence is a sorta interesting challenge. You will remember that when Trump lost the 2020 election, Pence had an allegedly ceremonial role certifying the results. Which he did, guaranteeing a normal transfer of power and getting to hear the Jan. 6 crowd of rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”Should we be grateful? I mean, yeah, sure, when it comes to writing his obituary. But do you want to root for Pence this time around? He’s extremely conservative, especially on social matters. (“Well, I think defending the unborn first and foremost is more important than politics. I really believe it’s the calling of our time.”)Sigh. Will the Republican field get any bigger? Or is it going the other way? I was watching one of the TV news channels the other day and suddenly a headline flashed:“Breaking News: Sununu Passes on Presidential Campaign.”Yes — shocker of the week! — the governor of New Hampshire has decided he’s not going to try for the nomination. Possibly the highest-ranking Republican in the country who definitely doesn’t want to give it a shot.Guess you’ll all have to stop saying, “Yeah, but wait until Chris Sununu gets in there.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Mike Pence Hasn’t Grown Less Conservative, but Republicans Have Shifted

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      The polls say the former vice president, who announced his 2024 candidacy in a video on Wednesday, has little chance. But he is driven by his faith.Mike Pence is the most conservative candidate competing for the presidency. The former vice president wants abortion banned from the point of conception. He’s the only major candidate calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And he has the most hawkish foreign policy, especially on confronting Russia.Being the most conservative used to matter in Republican presidential primaries.Not anymore.The president Mr. Pence served under, Donald J. Trump, transformed the G.O.P. electorate, making the path to a Pence presidency visible only to the truest of true believers. Mr. Pence has not really changed all that much since he was governor of Indiana less than a decade ago, but his party has. It’s the same Mike Pence but a different G.O.P., and it’s a different G.O.P. because of his former boss.The Republican Party’s intense focus on character and morality during the Bill Clinton years has been replaced by a different credo — articulated by a former Justice Department official, Jeffrey B. Clark, during a recent Twitter squabble over Mr. Trump’s fitness for office.“We’re not a congregation voting for a new pastor,” argued Mr. Clark, the one senior Justice Department official who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election. “We’re voting for a leader of the nation.”By this way of thinking, it doesn’t matter that Mr. Pence has been married only once and is so determined to honor his vows that he doesn’t allow himself to dine alone with a woman who is not his wife. Nor does it matter how many affairs Mr. Trump has had or whether he paid hush money to a porn star. Mr. Trump silences all of that, in a way, with one blunt social media post: “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”Mr. Pence, who announced his candidacy in a video early Wednesday, hours before a planned rally in a Des Moines suburb, is given little chance by anybody outside of his core team. Republican pollsters and strategists have written him off. Faced with Mr. Pence’s situation — being both dominated and burdened by Mr. Trump — most politicians would have concluded, after reviewing polls and focus groups, that there was no “theory of the case” for him to win the nomination.But Mr. Pence appears to have no use for statistical analysis.Mr. Pence in Des Moines on Saturday. Even in heavily evangelical Iowa, he polls around just 5 percent.Jordan Gale for The New York Times“Our country’s in a lot of trouble,” Mr. Pence says in his nearly three-minute-long announcement video, accusing “President Joe Biden and the radical left” of weakening America “at home and abroad.”Citing “runaway inflation,” a looming recession, a southern border “under siege,” unchecked “enemies of freedom” in Russia and China “on the march,” and what he calls an unprecedented assault on “timeless American values,” he promises to deliver what he says the nation sorely needs.“We’re better than this,” Mr. Pence says. “We can turn this country around. But different times call for different leadership. Today our party and our country need a leader that’ll appeal, as Lincoln said, to the better angels of our nature.”Whereas some Republican politicians use God as a talking point and have little acquaintance with the Bible, Mr. Pence makes every decision through the filter of Scripture. When he says he has prayed on a decision, he means it, and that includes running for president. Throughout his political career, according to people who have worked for him, Mr. Pence has gathered around his staff and his family in frequent prayer. If his theory of the case in this race seems to rely more on faith than data — that’s because it does.Mr. Pence served as Mr. Trump’s yes-man for three years and 11 months. In that final month, Mr. Pence refused to follow a presidential order that was plainly unconstitutional: to single-handedly overturn the 2020 election. His loyalty to the Constitution was rewarded with people in a pro-Trump mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol, while Mr. Pence and his family rushed to a barely secure room.Instead of punishing Mr. Trump for how he treated Mr. Pence, Republican voters have made him their front-runner. More than 50 percent of Republicans support the former president in national polls. Mr. Pence draws around 4 percent. Even in heavily evangelical Iowa, where Mr. Pence is staking his candidacy, he polls around 5 percent.Mr. Pence and Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, began certifying the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Pence has no trouble explaining his policy positions. He will run for president as a national security hawk, a staunch social conservative, a free-trader and a fiscal conservative. Nobody who knows him well doubts his sincerity on any of these issues. He may be running the least poll-tested campaign in the Republican field.The problem is that the Mike Pence known to most Republicans is a man whose job for four years was to cheer Mr. Trump through policies and actions that often contradicted his professed principles. If Mr. Pence, in a moment of introspection, wonders why the party he has long aspired to lead no longer seems interested in being led by someone like him, he may shoulder some portion of the blame himself.The Trump-Pence administration added around $8 trillion to the national debt. So much for fiscal conservatism. The Trump-Pence administration had a trade policy that, for the most part, delighted protectionist Democrats. So much for free trade. And while Mr. Trump spent his first three years in office largely listening to his more conventional national security advisers, in his final year he laid the groundwork for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence did not support.Mr. Trump’s current articulation of his “America First” foreign policy — which involves dropping U.S. support for Ukraine and musing about giving away chunks of Ukrainian land to the Russians — could not be further removed from Mr. Pence’s Reaganite vision of America defending freedom across the globe.But it’s not just Mr. Pence’s anti-populist policies that hobble him. It’s that Republican voters have sharply different expectations of their leaders than they did during Mr. Pence’s political rise as a member of Congress and then governor of Indiana.For the past seven years, Mr. Trump has trained Republican voters to value a different set of virtues in their candidates. He has trained them to value Republicans who fight hard and dirty, using whatever tactics are necessary to vanquish their opponents. He has also trained them to avert their gazes from behaviors that were once considered disqualifying.Mr. Pence averted his gaze for four years as Mr. Trump’s vice president, sticking with him through various controversies.Al Drago for The New York TimesFor four years, Mr. Pence, too, averted his gaze. He stuck with Mr. Trump through numerous controversies including the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia. He vouched for Mr. Trump’s character with skeptical evangelicals with whom Mr. Trump ultimately forged his own relationship.When Mr. Trump, as president, showered praise on the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his vice president, bound by loyalty, stayed silent. Yet recently on the campaign trail, after Mr. Trump had congratulated Mr. Kim for his country’s readmission to the World Health Organization’s executive board, Mr. Pence scolded his former boss for “praising the dictator in North Korea.”Mr. Pence may finally feel liberated to tell voters what he really thinks about Mr. Trump. His problem is that most Republicans don’t want to hear it. More

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      Chris Christie: Columnists and Writers Discuss His 2024 Candidacy.

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      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey.Candidate strength averagesRon DeSantis: 6.1Tim Scott: 4.6Nikki Haley: 3.5Mike Pence: 3.0Asa Hutchinson: 2.3Chris Christie: 2.0How seriously should we take Chris Christie’s candidacy?Frank Bruni Medium seriously, not for his minuscule potential to be the nominee but for his somewhat greater potential to diminish Donald Trump and to scramble the overall picture. Among Trump’s challengers, he has a singular combination of meanness and keenness, and he’s not vying for veep. He won’t walk on eggshells. He’ll do some vengeful, spiteful Jersey jitterbug on them.Jane Coaston Mildly.Michelle Cottle As a potential president, not very. As someone who could rough up Trump for the entire field — a political picador of sorts — he has potential.Ross Douthat Unless he invents a time dial that spins us back to 2012, the year he probably should have run for president, not seriously at all.David French There’s a distinction between Chris Christie’s presence in the race and his candidacy. His candidacy isn’t serious. There is zero path to victory. But his presence might matter, just as it did when he demolished Marco Rubio’s candidacy in a 2016 primary debate.Nicole Hemmer Chris Christie is a deeply unpopular politician, but he’s also a man on a mission: to take out Trump. Understood in that light, he’s worth paying attention to, if only to see which of Trump’s weaknesses he’s able to exploit.Katherine Mangu-Ward He’s having fun with it. So should we.Daniel McCarthy He’s not a plausible contender. But he must sense that he’s not any less plausible than the other alternatives to Donald Trump, so why not run?What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?Bruni He’s not fashioning himself as Trump-plus, Trump-minus or any other improved version of Trump. He’s the anti-Trump, imploring Republicans to grapple with who Trump is and how far the party has staggered from its supposed principles. That’s a noble play even if it’s a self-aggrandizing ploy.Coaston He believes that there is a way to be a Republican that isn’t Trumpian, and he believes that Americans will respond to that version of the G.O.P.Cottle Well, someone needs to experiment with going hard at the MAGA king. If he can muster the will, Christie has skill.Douthat There’s a narrative in which having played a crucial role in Donald Trump’s 2016 ascent — shivving Trump’s rivals on the debate stage and then offering him an early endorsement — Christie will now play a crucial role in his downfall, by attacking Trump with the gusto he once brought to taking down Marco Rubio. But I’m not sure that Christie will even qualify for the debate stage; if he does, I suspect he’ll be strongly tempted to attack his non-Trump rivals as often as he swings at Trump; and even if he attacks Trump, I don’t think he’s particularly well positioned to prosecute the case.French Christie is a guided missile aimed rhetorically right at Trump.Hemmer Christie bullies well. In the 2016 primaries, he relished eviscerating Senator Rubio. He failed to do the same to Trump at the time, but seven years later, he has plenty of new material to work with.Mangu-Ward The conventional wisdom holds that Christie can take a bite out of Trump’s support by getting in some one-liners at the debates. But that gives too much weight to the debates themselves. There is simply no zinger zingy enough to bring down Trump — or to overcome Christie’s mixed record as a smart, accomplished governor whose pragmatism too often bleeds into the appearance of opportunism or even corruption.McCarthy He’ll make other not-Trumps seem bland by comparison. Christie’s ridicule won’t stop the ex-president but could maim anyone else unlucky enough to be its target.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about his vision for America?Bruni Well, he’s wagering that America is better than Trump — that a critical mass of Republicans can finally grasp the Trump threat and see the Trump damage. I’m inspired by that possibility, no matter how remote.Coaston I don’t find his vision — a particular kind of American stasis — particularly inspiring or unsettling.Cottle Does he have one? Does it matter?Douthat Nothing in particular, since I don’t think he’s offering one yet.French By far the most inspiring aspect of Christie’s candidacy is his vision for a Trump-free G.O.P. By far the most unsettling is Christie’s previous sycophantic capitulation to the same man he attacks today. How much can any voter trust that Christie has learned his lesson?Hemmer People run for president for all sorts of reasons other than to become president: to promote new policies, break glass ceilings, increase book sales. Some mix of genuine concern for the party and vengeance (Trump booted Christie as transition chair in 2016 and most likely gave him a grave case of Covid in 2020) isn’t the worst reason to run.Mangu-Ward Christie’s vision of America seems to be one where Donald Trump is not president. For some, perhaps that is inspiring enough.McCarthy His vision for America is New Jersey, and most Republicans, at least, find that unsettling.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Christie candidacy?Bruni By the Iowa caucuses, Trump could be under multiple indictments and in such a flamboyant mental tailspin that Republicans must listen seriously to his rivals. Are they really going to prefer DeSantis’s whine to Christie’s roar?Coaston New Jersey normalcy.Cottle Takes a bully to smack a bully.Douthat Don’t want Trump? The rules are clear: Only a tristate-area Republican can defeat another tristate-area Republican.French No one is more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose.Hemmer You want a straight-talking, no-holds-barred candidate who will pummel your enemies but stop short of fomenting an insurrection? Christie’s your guy.Mangu-Ward Spicy words, bland policies.McCarthy Wouldn’t it be fun to see him debate Joe Biden?Ross Douthat and David French are Times columnists.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer.Michelle Cottle (@mcottle) is a member of the Times’s editorial board.Jane Coaston is a Times Opinion writer.Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) is an associate professor of history and director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of “Modern Age: A Conservative Review.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Doug Burgum, Wealthy North Dakota Governor, Enters Presidential Race

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      As the leader of a deep-red state, Mr. Burgum has promoted staunchly conservative policies, signing into law a near-total ban on abortion.Gov. Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota who rose from a chimney sweep to become one of the richest men in the state, announced a campaign for president on Wednesday, entering an increasingly crowded race in which he faces exceedingly long odds.“We need a new leader for a changing economy,” Mr. Burgum wrote in an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that focused heavily on his business acumen. He plans to appear at an event around midday in Fargo, N.D.The size of the field signals that former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has not scared off many challengers. But he has also yet to fully consolidate support behind his candidacy, and numerous rivals apparently see a path to the nomination, no matter how narrow it might be.As the leader of his deep-red state, Mr. Burgum has overseen a period of significant economic expansion and promoted staunchly conservative policies.This year, Mr. Burgum signed into law a near-total ban on abortion and created significant restrictions on gender transition care, including banning any requirements that teachers or school administrators use a student’s preferred pronouns.He is the second sitting governor to enter the race, after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has staked out aggressively conservative social policy positions and attracted the national spotlight for dust-ups with major corporations like Disney.Yet Mr. Burgum’s aides say he is planning a campaign less focused on social issues and more on his business background and fiscal stewardship of the state, which included cuts to both local property taxes and state income taxes. He is set to emphasize the economy, energy and national security in his early campaigning, viewing the current debate as too focused on social issues and not on voters’ biggest concerns.In a recent interview with the editorial board of The Fargo Forum, a local news outlet, Mr. Burgum said he believed that 60 percent of American voters had been neglected as the fringes dominated political debate.“All the engagement right now is occurring on the edge,” he said. “There’s definitely a yearning for some alternatives right now.”Though his national media appearances have been scarce, Mr. Burgum has been able to break through during debates over energy policy, offering a window into how he might frame his proposals in contrast to those of Republican rivals and of President Biden. In March, he told Fox News that the Biden administration’s economic plan was “disconnected from economics, it’s disconnected from physics and it’s disconnected from common sense.” He argued that Japan and other Asian countries were ripe markets for American energy exports.On Monday, his campaign sought to address his scant national name recognition with a glossy biography video in which the governor tells his life story, set to sweeping vistas of North Dakota bluffs and energy fields. His campaign’s confidence that he can rise from a relative unknown to legitimate candidate derives from his own political career in North Dakota. When Mr. Burgum announced his bid for governor in 2016, he was an outsider with little name recognition outside Fargo, and his main opponent, Wayne Stenehjem, the state attorney general, received the North Dakota Republican Party’s endorsement.But with ample resources and a campaign that ran to the right — Mr. Burgum endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in May 2016 — he cruised to a 20-percentage-point victory that The Bismarck Tribune proclaimed “upended the North Dakota Republican Party establishment.” He has not been seriously challenged in North Dakota since.“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” Mr. Burgum told The Fargo Forum. “That’s a competitive advantage.”As the only candidate not from the East Coast and with an upbringing deeply rooted in the rural Midwest, Mr. Burgum is likely to focus most of his efforts in Iowa, a state with an extensive agricultural community. Mr. Burgum grew up in Arthur, N.D., a town of barely 300 where his family owned the only grain elevator.While attending North Dakota State University as an undergraduate, Mr. Burgum began a chimney sweeping service in Fargo out of a friend’s pickup truck. His newfound business attracted the attention of local newspapers, who ran photos of a soot-laden Mr. Burgum clad in a tuxedo hopping from roof to roof, picking up roughly $40 per chimney.Mr. Burgum attached those newspaper clips to his applications for business school, and he soon enrolled in Stanford Business School. After earning his M.B.A. at Stanford, Mr. Burgum joined Great Plains Software, a Fargo company that specialized in accounting software, and quickly rose to chief executive.Far from the more fertile tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Mr. Burgum built Great Plains Software into a major industry player, eventually selling to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. He would then serve as a senior vice president at Microsoft until 2007.Mr. Burgum’s worth stretches into nine figures, certainly enough to help finance a nascent presidential run, and his aides expect his business network to help pull in major donors as well. But as of the start of his campaign, no super PAC or outside group has emerged supporting Mr. Burgum’s candidacy. More

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      Do Christie and Pence Make It 2016 Again? Not Yet.

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      A bigger field in the G.O.P. primary could chip away at DeSantis’s chances of overtaking Trump.A crowded field could help Donald Trump, as it did in 2015-16. Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressIt’s been feeling a bit like 2016 lately.Back then, the opposition to Donald J. Trump was badly divided. The party couldn’t coalesce behind one candidate, allowing Mr. Trump to win the Republican primary with well under half of the vote.With Mike Pence and Chris Christie bringing the field up to 10 candidates this week, it’s easy to wonder whether the same conditions might be falling into place again. Despite high hopes at the start of the year, Ron DeSantis has failed to consolidate Trump-skeptic voters and donors alike. Now, the likes of Mr. Pence and Mr. Christie — as well as Tim Scott and Nikki Haley — are in the fray and threatening to leave the Trump opposition hopelessly divided, as it was seven years ago.In the end, Mr. Pence or Mr. Christie might well break out and leave the opposition to Mr. Trump as fractured as it was in 2016. But it’s worth noting that, so far, the opposition to Mr. Trump has been far more unified than it ever was back then. It’s not 2016, at least not yet.So far this cycle, polls have consistently shown Mr. DeSantis with the support of a majority of Republican voters who don’t support Mr. Trump. Nothing like this happened in that past primary, when at various points five different candidates could claim to be the strongest “not-Trump” candidate, and none came even close to consolidating so much of the opposition to Mr. Trump. Ted Cruz got there eventually, but only after a majority of delegates had been awarded and it was down to him and John Kasich.Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. DeSantis’s share of not-Trump voters has remained constant, even though his own support has dropped. This suggests Mr. DeSantis has mainly bled support to Mr. Trump, not to another not-Trump rival. It also suggests that the other not-Trump candidates may have bled support to Mr. Trump over the last half year as well.Consolidation of Not-Trump Voters More

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      How Christie and Trump’s Friendship Flourished, Then Deteriorated

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      The two men had a relationship that could be genuinely warm, and at other times transactional. Now they are vying for the presidency in open hostility.Their friendship began after an introduction through Donald J. Trump’s sister. It ended nearly 20 years later, when Mr. Trump refused to concede the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.In between, Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and Mr. Trump had a relationship that could be genuinely warm, with chats about politics and current events, and at other times transactional.Mr. Christie gave Mr. Trump a boost by endorsing his 2016 candidacy after ending his own bid for the Republican nomination, and then coached him for debates and led his initial presidential transition team. In return, Mr. Trump passed him over for the roles of vice president and attorney general.Mr. Trump eventually turned back to Mr. Christie for other advice during his term. But by the midway point of the presidency, Mr. Christie seemed content to be on the outside.Their last exchange was in August 2021, according to a person briefed on the matter, when the former president had an aide send Mr. Christie a testy message.Now, they have entered a new chapter: open hostility. Mr. Christie announced his second presidential campaign on Tuesday in New Hampshire, aiming to stop Mr. Trump from a second term in the White House.“I think he’s a coward and I think he’s a puppet of Putin,” Mr. Christie, speaking recently to the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, said of the man he once supported.Here’s a look back at how their relationship grew, thrived and then wilted.Casual Acquaintances, Then Presidential RivalsMr. Christie was a United States attorney in New Jersey, where Mr. Trump still had casinos, when the two men first dined together.That May 2002 introduction over dinner came through an intermediary, Maryanne Trump Barry, Mr. Trump’s older sister, who was a federal judge in the state at the time and described Mr. Trump to Mr. Christie as “my little brother.” In Mr. Christie’s 2019 memoir, “Let Me Finish,” he wrote about his first impressions of Mr. Trump, who in two years would begin his run as the star of the reality TV show “The Apprentice.”“Donald was opinionated,” Mr. Christie wrote. “He was bombastic. He was entertaining. He talked about his business with infectious enthusiasm and considerable detail. I came away with the impression that public Donald and the private Donald were pretty much one and the same.”It was soon clear that Mr. Christie could end up as a candidate for governor someday. He won the office in his first attempt, in 2009, two years before Mr. Trump considered running for the White House against President Barack Obama.Mr. Christie won the governorship in 2009 alongside Kim Guadagno, who served as lieutenant governor.Jeff Zelevansky/ReutersBoth men knew each other in the way that prominent people in the New York media market tend to: casually, with paths that periodically crossed.In 2015, both Mr. Christie and Mr. Trump ended up declaring presidential candidacies.Mr. Christie, by then hobbled by the “Bridgegate” political retribution scandal, had nonetheless fashioned a national political brand as a straight-talking candidate.By contrast, some viewed Mr. Trump as a sideshow who would eventually fade, even as he was leading in the polls. At the time, Mr. Trump told Mr. Christie privately that he didn’t expect his campaign to last beyond October 2015.Their relationship began to be tested. Two months after Mr. Trump’s entrance into the race, Mr. Christie told Fox News that the New York businessman didn’t have the “temperament” or experience to be president. Mr. Trump taunted Mr. Christie for being absent from New Jersey, where he was still governor.Ultimately, Mr. Trump overshadowed his newfound rival — and all other rivals — with an endless stream of inflammatory pronouncements, including a proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country.Mr. Christie and Mr. Trump traded barbs after they both entered the race for their party’s presidential nomination.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMr. Trump saved his most hostile barbs for candidates other than Mr. Christie. In turn, the governor trained his most aggressive fire on Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during a debate in New Hampshire shortly before the state’s primary, mocking him for a “memorized 25-second speech.”But after staking his candidacy on New Hampshire, Mr. Christie finished a dismal sixth and dropped out of the race.A Key Ally, Up to a PointWhen Mr. Trump won the South Carolina primary, Mr. Christie told allies the writing was on the wall — it was clear Mr. Trump was on track to become the nominee.“I am proud to be here to endorse Donald Trump for president of the United States,” Mr. Christie said at an endorsement event in Florida in February 2016, as astonished reporters watched him praise Mr. Trump’s candidacy. After Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Mr. Christie was one of the first prominent Republicans to endorse Mr. Trump at a time when the party’s leadership was still trying to stop his ascent.Soon, Mr. Christie was a key adviser to Mr. Trump. He was also for a time considered as a potential running mate, but some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including members of his family, argued against it. (Mr. Christie had also prosecuted the father of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner years earlier, and Mr. Kushner was opposed to the selection of Mr. Christie.)After Mr. Christie endorsed Mr. Trump, he became a member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle and helped lead his transition to the White House.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesMr. Trump ultimately chose Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, who had been introduced to Mr. Trump through Mr. Christie.Mr. Trump tried to keep Mr. Christie on the hook, the former governor wrote in his memoir, insisting in a phone call to Mr. Christie that he hadn’t decided on his running mate yet, even as he made plans to fly Mr. Pence to New York for a news conference.Mr. Christie led Mr. Trump’s preparations for the general-election debates against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. But after the October 2016 release of a recording in which Mr. Trump described grabbing women by their genitals, Mr. Trump privately griped that Mr. Christie had not more vocally backed him.Mr. Christie also served as the head of his transition team, a job from which he was dismissed shortly after Election Day by Mr. Kushner; Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist for Mr. Trump; and Reince Priebus, who would become Mr. Trump’s first White House chief of staff.Behind the Scenes, DistancingMr. Trump asked Mr. Christie to lead a task force on opioids, an issue Mr. Christie had been concerned about as governor. Mr. Christie was also said to be a personal favorite of Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania.As president, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Christie to lead a task force on opioids but passed over Mr. Christie for other roles in his administration.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut Mr. Trump decided against giving him the job of attorney general, which went to Mr. Sessions. Instead, Mr. Christie has said, the president offered him various roles at different points, including labor secretary and secretary of the Homeland Security Department.Mr. Trump also took a suggestion from Mr. Christie as to who could replace the fired F.B.I. director, James A. Comey. It was Mr. Christie’s lawyer during the Bridgegate scandal, Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed and remains atop the agency. Mr. Trump soon started complaining that Mr. Wray was not doing what he wanted at the agency, and blamed Mr. Christie for a nomination that Mr. Trump had put forward.Mr. Christie took himself out of consideration to succeed John F. Kelly as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff at the end of 2018 after Mr. Trump had offered the job to Mr. Christie. By then, it had become clear that Mr. Trump was cycling through staff members and firing them at a rapid clip.In February 2020, Mr. Trump pardoned a former software chief executive whose clemency Mr. Christie had lobbied for.That year, Mr. Christie wrote Mr. Trump a lengthy memo instructing him how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. It was ignored.Mr. Christie’s relationship with the president grew increasingly strained and later severed after the 2020 presidential election, when Mr. Christie said he advised Mr. Trump to concede to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Al Drago for The New York TimesMr. Trump brought Mr. Christie in for debate preparations once again, and some of his aides faulted Mr. Christie when Mr. Trump’s initial debate against Mr. Biden was disastrous. (Mr. Trump appeared physically unwell at the debate and may have already been affected by the coronavirus; the news of his Covid diagnosis came days later.)When both Mr. Trump and Mr. Christie were hospitalized with serious bouts of Covid shortly after that debate, Mr. Trump called his debate coach at the hospital. “Are you going to say you got it from me?” Mr. Trump asked Mr. Christie, the former governor later recounted in his second book, “Republican Rescue.” They both recovered, but Mr. Christie made clear he thought he should have worn a mask at the prep sessions, angering Mr. Trump.BreakupHours after Election Day ended, when Mr. Trump delivered a speech claiming widespread fraud, Mr. Christie, by then a contributor for ABC News, said on air that Mr. Trump needed to offer proof.In an interview with The New York Times in November 2022, Mr. Christie said he had last spoken with Mr. Trump in December 2020, after the president saw him deride Mr. Trump’s legal team on television. Mr. Christie told him he should concede the election to Mr. Biden and host the president-elect in the White House.“He told me he would never, ever, ever, ever do that,” Mr. Christie said. “And that was the last time we spoke.”In 2021, Mr. Trump described Mr. Christie as an “opportunist” to a reporter. Four months later, he had an aide send Mr. Christie a printout of a tweet by Mr. Christie related to the pardon that he had sought for the former software executive. “Chris,” he wrote, according to the person briefed on it, “How quickly people (some) forget – Best Wishes,” with his signature.Mr. Christie responded cordially, wishing Mr. Trump well.Shane Goldmacher More

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      What to Know About Chris Christie as He Enters 2024 Presidential Race

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      Mr. Christie, a onetime star presidential recruit who finished in sixth place in New Hampshire in 2016, has become a fierce Trump critic.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who announced a second campaign for president on Tuesday after a disappointing run in 2016, has had a roller coaster of a political career in more ways than one.In the span of four years, he went from star presidential recruit to scandal-dogged sixth-place finisher in New Hampshire. In the next seven, he went from serving as one of Donald J. Trump’s most influential advisers to advertising himself as the only candidate brave enough to denounce Mr. Trump to his face.Here are five things to know about Mr. Christie.He had a meteoric rise in his first term as governor …Mr. Christie first drew national attention in 2009, when he was elected governor of New Jersey over a Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine.He quickly notched legislative victories for Republicans in a Democratic-leaning state, including passing a major overhaul of New Jersey’s public employee pension system.Making use of a tactic that is now commonplace but was more striking at the time, he also attacked critics at public events — in 2012, he told a law student who had heckled him that if “you conduct yourself like that in a courtroom, your rear end’s going to be thrown in jail, idiot.” His showmanship and combativeness made him appealing both to Republican voters and to party operatives, who began urging him to run for president in 2012.He didn’t, choosing instead to give the keynote address for Mitt Romney at the Republican National Convention, become the chairman of the Republican Governors Association and establish himself as an early front-runner for 2016.His profile rose further after his management of the state’s recovery from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when he famously welcomed President Barack Obama to New Jersey — an image that infuriated some Republicans but helped cement Mr. Christie’s reputation as someone who could switch modes from attack dog to bipartisan statesman as needed.… and a ‘Bridgegate’-fueled crash in his second term.If Mr. Christie’s first term as governor was politically triumphant, his second term was politically calamitous because of a scandal that became known as Bridgegate.In September 2013, not long before Mr. Christie was up for re-election as governor, high-ranking officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates bridges and tunnels between the two states, closed two of three lanes onto the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, N.J. The closings caused chaos.The ostensible rationale was to study traffic patterns. But it soon emerged that a Christie ally at the Port Authority had ordered the closings as part of a scheme to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing the governor’s re-election campaign — and that he had done so after Mr. Christie’s deputy chief of staff emailed him, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” In a trial in 2016 against the deputy chief of staff and a Port Authority official, a witness testified that Mr. Christie himself had been told of the political reason for the closings while they were happening, and had laughed.Mr. Christie denied involvement in the scandal, but it consumed his second term and proved a serious liability in his first presidential campaign. By the time he left office, he had the lowest approval rating recorded for any New Jersey governor.A campaign event in New Hampshire for Mr. Christie’s 2016 presidential run. Mr. Christie never gained much traction then — against any of his competitors, much less Mr. Trump.Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York TimesHis 2016 campaign served to knock out Marco Rubio.Mr. Christie first ran for president in 2016, a year that made mincemeat of quite a few Republicans seen as rising stars in the party, and he was no exception.He never gained much traction — against any of his competitors, much less Mr. Trump — and came in sixth in the New Hampshire primary after focusing his efforts there. He dropped out the next day.But Mr. Christie did have a significant impact on the trajectory of the Republican race, just not to his own benefit.He helped pave the way for Mr. Trump’s nomination by wounding the man who had looked to be his strongest opponent: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.In a debate in New Hampshire in early February, Mr. Christie went after Mr. Rubio mercilessly — accusing him of being inauthentic and relying on canned lines, a criticism Mr. Rubio lent credence to by responding with canned lines. (“There it is, everybody,” Mr. Christie replied.) The attack was so effective that the debate audience began to boo Mr. Rubio.Mr. Christie and Donald Trump ahead of a Trump rally in 2016.Mark Makela for The New York TimesHe was a member of Trump’s inner circle for years …After ending his own campaign, Mr. Christie quickly endorsed Mr. Trump, praising him for “rewriting the playbook of American politics.” His endorsement was a big deal given that most of the Republican establishment was still trying to find anyone other than Mr. Trump to coalesce around.Mr. Christie became a highly influential adviser to the Trump campaign. In characteristically combative fashion, he defended Mr. Trump even when he went too far for other Republicans.Implicit in the alliance was that Mr. Christie would get a high-ranking job in the Trump administration, perhaps even the vice presidency. But while Mr. Trump chose him to lead his presidential transition team and offered him cabinet posts, Mr. Christie did not get the job he really wanted: attorney general.Even so, he stayed loyal, helping Mr. Trump with debate preparation in 2020. He did not break away until Mr. Trump tried to overturn his election loss — at which point Mr. Christie began speaking forcefully, including in a book.Mr. Christie greets voters and students at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., earlier this year.Holly Ramer/Associated Press… but has reinvented himself as Trump Enemy No. 1.Mr. Christie is pitching himself as the only candidate willing to confront Mr. Trump head-on. (Though Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has begun to do that, other candidates largely have not, lest they alienate the pro-Trump Republican base.)In a pre-campaign stop in New Hampshire in March, Mr. Christie tried to convince voters that he was the man to do this by evoking his long-ago brawl with Mr. Rubio: “You better have somebody on that stage who can do to him what I did to Marco,” he said.Voters remain unconvinced. In a recent Monmouth University poll, Mr. Christie was the only candidate or potential candidate with a net-negative approval rating among Republicans — only 21 percent of whom viewed him favorably, compared with 47 percent who viewed him unfavorably.Mr. Christie said in New Hampshire in April: “I don’t think that anybody is going to beat Donald Trump by sidling up to him, playing footsie with him and pretending that you’re almost like him.”But the fact that he supported Mr. Trump throughout his presidency went unmentioned until a teenager asked a question: Given his denunciations of Mr. Trump for undermining democracy, did he still believe Mr. Trump had been a better choice than Mrs. Clinton?“I still would’ve picked Trump,” Mr. Christie acknowledged. More

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      Mike Pence’s Campaign Against Donald Trump Has Already Made History

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      In running for the Republican nomination against Donald J. Trump, Mike Pence will be the first vice president to directly challenge the president who originally put him on the ticket.He may not make it to the Oval Office. But he will make it into the history books, at least as an asterisk.As Mike Pence formally kicks off his underdog campaign for the White House on Wednesday, he will become something almost unheard-of since the founding of the republic — a former vice president running against the president who originally put him on the ticket.While it is not unusual for tension and even enmity to develop between presidents and vice presidents, never before has a No. 2 mounted a direct challenge to a onetime running mate in the way that Mr. Pence is taking on former President Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination next year.Vice presidents, after all, typically owe their national stature to the presidents who chose them, and even if they are not especially grateful, they rarely find it politically feasible to compete with their patrons. But Mr. Pence is gambling that Republican primary voters may eventually grow weary of Mr. Trump and turn to the other member of their party’s 2016 and 2020 tickets.“Having a former vice president contest the president he served for their party’s nomination in contested primaries is like a 234-year flood,” said Joel K. Goldstein, a specialist on the vice presidency at the St. Louis University School of Law. “It doesn’t happen.”“Defeated presidents don’t run again in modern times,” he added, “and vice presidents tend to inherit support from their administration’s supporters, not become pariahs to them” as Mr. Pence has since defying Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The broken relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence is itself a historical anomaly, of course. Mr. Trump sought to pressure Mr. Pence to claim the power to effectively reject Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the Electoral College, a power the vice president said he did not have. Mr. Trump was so angry that he publicly excoriated his own vice president, prompting a mob to hunt for him while chanting “hang Mike Pence” on Jan. 6, 2021. According to testimony, Mr. Trump suggested to aides that maybe his supporters were right.“The reason why no other vice president appears to have run against his president is that he was selected by the president, and there is almost always a personal bond stemming from a sense of loyalty and gratitude,” said Richard Moe, who was the chief of staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale. “I can’t think of another vice president who was treated more disrespectfully than Pence was by Trump.”There are no precise parallels to the current situation. In 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams, defeating the incumbent’s bid for a second term. In those early days of the republic, however, the vice president was not the president’s running mate, but the second-highest vote recipient in the previous election. Adams and Jefferson had run against each other in 1796, with Adams prevailing and Jefferson becoming vice president because he was the runner-up.The 12th Amendment ratified in 1804 changed that system so that the vice president was chosen in tandem with the president as part of the same ticket. That did not mean they were always on the same team. Many tickets have been forged between rivals who had just run against each other for the nomination, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980 and Barack Obama and Mr. Biden in 2008.The broken relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence is a historical anomaly. Doug Mills/The New York TimesSome vice presidents grew hostile to the presidents they served under, as when John C. Calhoun openly opposed Andrew Jackson during the nullification crisis pitting South Carolina against Washington over a tariff. After being dumped from the re-election ticket in 1832, Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to take a seat in the Senate to resist his former ticket mate’s agenda. Still, Calhoun never challenged Jackson as a candidate.In 1916, former President Theodore Roosevelt and his onetime vice president Charles W. Fairbanks both drew support on the opening ballots at the Republican convention but were not actively campaigning against each other. Hubert Humphrey and his 1968 running mate Edmund Muskie both ran in 1972 for the Democratic nomination, neither successfully. In 2000, former Vice President Dan Quayle ran against George W. Bush, the son of the man who put Mr. Quayle on the 1988 and 1992 tickets.But the closest the country has previously come to a direct contest between running mates was in 1940 when Vice President John Nance Garner, a conservative Texan known as Cactus Jack and no fan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, waged a campaign for the White House.Garner was known for his love of whiskey, once noting that “I don’t get drunk but once a day.” He is most famous today for his sour assessment of the vice presidency, which he declared not “worth a bucket of warm spit,” or some variation of that.Since no president to that point had run for a third consecutive term owing to the precedent set by George Washington, it was not entirely clear that Roosevelt would be a candidate in 1940, and he made no move to stop Garner or other associates from running. Still, there was no love lost between the two. “I see that the vice president has thrown his bottle — I mean his hat — into the ring,” Roosevelt quipped to his cabinet.Garner, a traditionalist, had fallen out with F.D.R. over the president’s effort to pack the Supreme Court and opposed breaking Washington’s precedent. “As retribution, he declared that he would run for the 1940 presidential nomination, but he never put his heart into it, and no one took his candidacy seriously,” said Mr. Moe, who wrote “Roosevelt’s Second Act,” a book about the 1940 race.Roosevelt played coy all the way up to the Democratic convention, when he finally arranged to be “drafted” to run again. Roosevelt swept to the nomination with 946 delegates. Garner finished third with 61.That election ushered in another change. Until that point, the parties generally chose the vice-presidential candidates, but from then on the nominees effectively took over that decision. Roosevelt picked Henry A. Wallace, leaving Garner to retire to his Texas ranch.At this point, Mr. Trump may regret the choice he made in 2016. But it is not clear that Mr. Pence will do any better than Cactus Jack did. More