Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said President Trump had an “awful” last week and warned that the Republican Party will soon have a “big problem” if the president doesn’t begin making Americans’ lives better.
“It’s not a strange week, Jon, it’s an awful week,” the former Trump ally-turned-critic told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl on a panel discussion Sunday on “This Week.”
“And the president better wake up to the fact that going to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, is not going to solve his problems,” Christie continued, “and that he better start solving the American people’s problems, or our party is going to have a big problem.”
Christie, who led unsuccessful GOP bids for president in 2016 and 2024, suggested the president needed to connect more to the American people, pointing to polling showing a majority of Americans say the economy is no better under Trump than it was during former President Biden’s tenure.
He criticized the president’s behavior over the past week, deriding him for the “disgraceful post” about the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, in which Trump suggested the acclaimed Hollywood director and Democratic donor died because of his disdain for the president, or from “Trump derangement syndrome.”
“Then he puts his name on the building named after an assassinated President. Then he gives a frenetic national TV speech filled with inaccuracies and really sounded like he was yelling at the American people that they don’t get how great he’s done so far. And then he puts these plaques up underneath the presidential pictures he’s put on the colonnade, filled with things that you could tell just from reading them that he wrote them himself,” Christie said, noting he “even figured out a way to get himself into the Andrew Jackson plaque, but as a martyr, worse than whatever happened to Andrew Jackson.”
Christie also knocked Trump for not yet nailing down a deal to end the war in Ukraine and noted there have now been two notable instances on Capitol Hill in which some Republicans broke with the president: on extending enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies and on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein documents.
But the president’s approval rating has ticked up slightly in recent weeks, after tumbling to a second-term low of 41 percent last month amid the record-long government shutdown, according to Decision Desk HQ’s polling aggregate. Since then, it’s ticked up to around 45 percent, which has been the rough average for him since taking office.
But signs suggest the president still faces headwinds as he enters 2026. Recent polls show the president with some of his lowest-ever economic approval ratings amid steep tariffs, high prices and cost-of-living issues.
The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
