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Sept. 14, 2023 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:07:39
Chris Christie: The Plan | EP 383
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We need to go all in from a hardware perspective.
They need to see that we are willing to stand up and allow an ally to have what they need to have to aggressively prosecute their own defense.
And by the way, I believe if we had done that early on in Russia, we wouldn't be in this circumstance with Ukraine.
And we should take that as a lesson for China and Taiwan and other areas in Asia.
Hello, everyone watching and listening.
Today I'm pleased to speak with lawyer, federal prosecutor, and former New Jersey governor, now running for president, Chris Christie, we discussed the unfortunate and disproportional power of teachers unions, the potentially perpetual state of the Ukraine-Russia war, the impact of the Biden laptop scandal, and why Donald Trump, at least in Mr.
Christie's opinion, might not be the right Republican candidate going forward.
All right.
Well, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today and to everyone who's listening and watching.
It's quite an exciting development as far as I'm concerned to see these long-form dialogues take their place in political discourse because it really allows people the opportunity to unfold their vision.
So I thought the first thing I might ask you, because I think this is the question that's foremost on my mind and should be, On the minds of people who are watching and listening, why do you think that you would be a good president?
What is it that makes you stand out from the rest of the pack, say, on the Republican side or on the Democrat side as well?
Why should people be concentrating on your campaign now?
First of all, thanks for having me on, and I look forward to this kind of long-form conversation as well.
I think it's much more informative for folks.
I'd say three things come to mind immediately.
The first is that You know, I think we've gotten in our country too small in terms of our politics.
We're arguing about what I think are relatively small things in the grand scheme of what our country should be working on.
We're dividing each other into smaller and smaller groups.
We're pitting each other against each other.
And anger seems to be the predominant emotion.
I want to be president because I want to do the big things.
This country, I think, has always been at its greatest when it does big things.
And, you know, for me, some of those examples of some of those things are our educational system.
K-12, I think, is failing our country and our families miserably when a third of our kids can't read at grade level.
In this country, we need to have a radical change in the way we educate kids K to 12.
And I'm going to go into some more detail on that, hopefully later in the conversation.
But I want to put parents much more in charge of those things and empower them to do it.
Second, crime in this country has become a near epidemic problem in our cities.
And it's affecting quality of life and the ability of people to enjoy all the great things that we have in America's cities.
And this is because prosecutors locally have decided they don't want to prosecute quality of life crime and violent crime in the way that they used to.
I think if you don't have a sense of the rule of law and law and order in your country, that that diminishes everyone's ability to enjoy their lives and to make the most of them.
And so, as president, I would make sure that we sent federal prosecutors into all the cities that have significant crime problems.
If the local prosecutors won't prosecute that violent crime, we will.
And make sure that we clean up what's going on in our cities.
Third, I think that America's got to continue to play a leading role in the world.
And I think we have too much dissent in our own party, which is fine to have the argument, but I think the argument needs to be resolved on behalf of America being a leader around the world.
And so that's why I favor our support in Ukraine and would enhance it, increase it, because I think it's a proxy war right now between the United States and the West and China.
China supplying the money for Russia to prosecute this war.
And the expansionism that has always been a part of Russian foreign policy is right on display.
And we need to stop it right where it is because a free and secure Europe is very important to America's political and economic future.
And lastly, what I'd say is that we don't talk to each other anymore in government.
We tweet at each other or whatever it's called now, X at each other.
We use social media to do that stuff.
The reason I'm different is because I was a Republican governor for eight years in a Democratic state with a Democratic state legislature.
And I had to figure out how to work with the other side to accomplish things that mattered and that were consistent with my principles.
There's nobody else in the race that's had that experience.
And that's most what it's like in Washington, D.C. And we need a president again who's willing to spend his or her political capital on building those relationships and trying to get things done.
I've always operated, Jordan, in my career in politics on the principle that it's harder to hate up close.
And the more that we get to know each other, the more we get to know each other's families, what motivated us to get into public life, what our priorities are, what we really want to accomplish, the greater chance we have to be able to get things done for the American people.
And so I think that makes me a lot different than any other candidate in this race.
And It will allow me to solve problems like immigration, solve problems like our entitlement programs and their impending bankruptcy and the effect that would have on the American people.
So that's why people should be focusing on me and on my campaign.
Okay, so you outlined four basic categories.
Education, law and order, let's say, foreign policy, America's role in the world, and then dialogue between Republicans and Democrats.
Let's start at the top of that list on the education side.
I know that as governor, you...
I've introduced a number of educational reforms.
I was reading today that, at least at the moment, there's no long-term indication that they've actually improved educational performance.
That's not surprising to me because it actually turns out to be quite difficult to reform education in a way that actually makes a difference.
And maybe that's wrong.
I haven't done a lot of Delving into the direct consequences of your reforms.
But I do have some specific questions on the education front.
And here's one that's really perplexed me for a long period of time.
So, I worked at Harvard in 92 to 98.
And I spent a lot of time analyzing research that was done in the departments or in the faculties of education.
And the faculties of education since the early 60s have abdicated their responsibility entirely.
They generally train the least motivated students at university, often the ones with the worst grades devolve into teaching because they can't figure out what else to do.
The quality of research that the faculties of education have produced, to call it appalling, has barely scraped the surface.
They've championed whole word reading, they've championed self-esteem training, emotional, social learning, multiple intelligences, like a whole emotional intelligence, a whole panoply of Of concepts that have no scientific standing whatsoever and have done nothing but hurt kids.
And they've become, they're likely among the most woke disciplines, the farthest left disciplines that have emerged within the university.
Yet, they have a hammerlock on teacher certification and that gives them access to 50% of American state budgets.
So one of the things I'm curious about, I also noticed that You had chaired the Republican Governors Association.
I cannot understand why the Republican governors haven't taken teacher certification away from the faculties of education.
Why are they allowed to have a hammerlock on teacher production?
There's no evidence whatsoever that they're good at doing their jobs, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.
So, well, that's a specific question I have, but I'm also curious about what else you're Devoted to on the educational reform front and why you think it would work.
Well, let me start by talking about your specific thing.
It was one of the big fights that I had in New Jersey that I wound up not being able to win because I needed legislative support to get it done.
And as hard as I tried to do it, the teachers unions, as you know, are an enormous political force.
And while I diminished a lot of their influence, I couldn't get off of the teacher certification front.
And I think you put your finger on something that is extraordinarily important if you're going to reform our national education system is the idea that great teachers do not often come from departments of education in our universities and colleges.
And so that's one of the fronts that we have to have a national conversation and arguments about.
More broadly, I do think that When you talk about the hammerlock on 50% of state budgets, you're right, and in some instances it's even more in terms of the amount of money that's spent.
We're spending about $800 billion nationwide a year on K-12 education.
And I think it's time to have the federal government lead the way and encourage states that are already providing educational choice and those that are not to move much more towards a choice model.
And not just for underprivileged folks, but for everybody.
And that is, public schools will only get better if they have to compete.
And if they have to compete in a meaningful way against other options, private schools, parochial schools, but also within the public system, a broader availability of charter schools and Renaissance schools, which operate much differently.
So when you look back in New Jersey, one of the places where our reforms did have a huge impact was in the city of Camden.
Where they had six of the ten lowest performing schools, individual schools, in the entire state.
And what we did was take over the Board of Education there, and we encouraged the development of charter and Renaissance schools in the city and authorized them to compete with the traditional public schools.
And what you've seen, Jordan, is an enormous increase In both the reading and math scores, if you look at the last 10 years in the city of Camden, there's been an enormous increase in that in the K-5 range.
And I think that that competition leads to other reforms that are really necessary.
For instance, having a longer school year.
Having a 10.5 to an 11-month school year rather than the school year we do now.
Having longer school days.
You know, kids need more time both every day and throughout the year to be educated in the right way, and especially kids who come from our inner cities and may not necessarily have the support at home to encourage the type of learning that becomes holistic.
And so we need to reform this in every way we can and provide more choice and give parents the financial resources they need to be able to effectuate that choice.
So if you want to go to a public school, if you have a good public school in your town, continue to go to it.
And your money will go to that public school.
But if you choose to send them to a charter school, a renaissance school, a private school, a parochial school, you should have the resources in an account to be able to spend on your child's education rather than continuing to kowtow to the public sector teachers unions that, as we saw most starkly during COVID, care only about protecting the least of their members and not in the main in educating our children.
So I would like to delve a bit more into, you said that when you tried to transform the hammerlock of the teachers union, say, on the provision of teaching in New Jersey, that you battled to a standstill.
And that was partly because you were also facing a Democrat-controlled legislative assembly.
And so, of course, that makes it more difficult.
But I'm still, my curiosity in this front isn't satiated yet because it looks to me like such a colossal failure on the Republican side, both at the state level, local, state, and national level, to allow...
We're in the midst of a terrible culture war.
It's not exactly obvious that even the classic liberals or the conservatives are winning.
It's clearly the case that the radicals have got a hold of the education system.
They're doing that through the faculties of education.
I can't understand how it can be that the Republicans have essentially been blind to this for 60 years.
It's 60 years now.
Given that the long-term future of the political state rests upon the information that kids are receiving in schools with regards to their political education.
But you have hands-on experience with this.
You tried to fight the fight and it was very, very difficult for you to bring about any reform.
So two questions there.
Why exactly was it so difficult?
What is it that the teachers' unions manage with their access to these great...
And also, why do you think, why are you convinced that the provision of choice among parents is the proper primary target in relationship to educational reform?
First, on the battle on certification.
I agree with you, by the way, in states where Republicans control everything.
It's astonishing to me that you wouldn't focus on teacher certification and taking that out of the hands of the professional teachers' unions.
And so, to me, it was one of the things that we focused on very early on.
So it wasn't something we missed.
It gets to your second point, which is, I'll give you, for instance, in my state, we have 200,000 members Of the teachers union in our state that create through their dues, which at the time I was governor, were $700 a year.
So the teachers union was collecting $140 million a year, and they didn't pay a nickel toward teacher salaries, teacher pension, or teacher health care.
And that money was just a slush fund to reward their friends and to punish their enemies.
That's a lot of money, Jordan, in a state.
And the best indication of it is if you look at the state capitol in Trenton, New Jersey— When I would look out the front door of the State House, beside the State House, the second largest building on State Street in Trenton was the Teachers Union building.
It was no mistake.
They wanted to send that message every time a legislator walked in and out of that building that they're bigger and stronger than any other interest group in the state.
Now look, I campaigned against them and won twice statewide.
It's possible to win these things.
But in a state legislature dominated by Democrats, they essentially buy them, Jordan.
I mean, they just buy them both in terms of buying them with favor, but also buying them through fear and intimidation.
And, you know, they went after the Senate, a Democratic Senate president in my state because he went with me on some educational reform issues, most particularly pension reform for teachers and health benefit reform for teachers.
so they'd have to pay more into those systems to make them more solvent.
They went after him three different elections.
And the guy is the president of the Ironworkers Union in New Jersey, a fellow union member.
They went after him three times.
The third time they finally defeated him and he's out of the legislature now.
So they try to show persistence with their object lessons.
And in a state where you have a democratic legislature or democratic governor, you just saw this in Pennsylvania.
Josh Shapiro ran as a centrist Democrat for governor, promising that he would provide educational choice.
The Republican legislature put the bill on his desk and he vetoed it under pressure from the teachers union and broke his word that he gave during the campaign and during the transition.
And so it's another example of it.
Lastly, you asked why I focus on parental choice.
Because I think it's one of the hardest arguments to argue against, that if, in fact, your education that you're providing in the traditional public schools is so great, then of course parents would choose it.
But if it isn't, parents should have the right to make that choice for their kids, and it should be any parent gets the right to make that choice.
I do think, Jordan, that our history has shown that competition does almost always bring improvement.
And also exposes weakness.
And that could be another way to get at the teacher certification issue.
Because remember, these charter schools, private schools, parochial schools often can operate under different rules.
They don't have unions in the main that they have to deal with and can hire some different folks.
And I think that that can help by showing how successful they are to break the hammerlock that you very rightly pointed out at the top of this conversation on teacher certification in our public schools.
Right, so it allows for more experimentation with regards to the provision of education, highlights weaknesses, and allows for the poorer players to be deselected by the market.
So the experimentation issue there seems key as well.
It doesn't hurt as well, I suppose, to also devolve back to parents the responsibility to pay some attention to exactly how their children are being educated.
What do you think strategically might be done, apart from focusing on parental choice amongst the Republicans or more classically liberal or conservatively oriented people, to push back against the monopoly that's enjoyed by the teachers unions and the teacher certification process?
What did you learn from What did you learn strategically from the battle you engaged in in New Jersey?
Well, with the successes that we had, Jordan, the way we got them was by pointing out commonsensical problems with the way the system operates.
So, for instance, I did over 100 town hall meetings on this issue across our state on the issues of pension and health benefits.
When I became governor, a typical teacher who would retire at 25 years of service with a large pension, 70% of salary, of their highest salary, they would have used all the money they paid into the system after two and a half years of retirement.
And teachers never paid a nickel towards their health benefits in our state while they were working and in retirement.
The taxpayers paid all of it.
So I used to go to town hall meetings and say, how many of you would like that deal?
How many of you have that deal?
And nobody would raise their hand.
And I said, well, you're paying for that.
When people came to recognize that they were paying for that type of extravagant retirement and health benefit system, the teachers' union approval in our state, because we polled it, went from when I started these meetings in the mid-70s down to the mid-30s.
And people saw the union as selfish and self-consumed and abusive of the taxpayers.
What that did, Jordan, was it opened up the conversation on everything else.
Because once you show that the representatives of these teachers were selfish and self-consumed and not focused on quality, That was problem one.
Problem two was I went, in order to try to break this monopoly, I went to some of the worst school districts in our state and pointed out two significant facts beside the underperformance of the students.
The first was that they turned out to be the most expensive school districts.
So, for instance, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, we were paying $44,000 a pupil.
To get awful performance.
In the city of Newark, we had $36,000 per pupil for awful performance.
In the city of Camden, $38,000 per pupil.
They could have gone to any private school in America at that time for that number or less and gotten a significantly better education.
Secondly, we then talked about the way the teachers union protects the worst of their members.
So for instance, in Newark, we had over 100 teachers who literally reported every day to what they called the rubber room, where they were not permitted to teach anymore, but the teachers union prevented them from being fired.
So the school district made the decision, Jordan, if you believe it, that it would be better off for the kids to pay these teachers to do nothing than to have them in a classroom.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When you pointed these things out to folks, it opened up the entire conversation.
So for instance, I was able to negotiate with Randy Weingarten, believe it or not, merit pay for teachers in Newark.
That for the first time, we would actually reward the teachers who were showing greater results with greater pay and take away this kind of monopolistic view that every teacher is the same and every teacher should be paid the same based purely upon experience rather than on performance.
That would have never happened, Jordan, if I hadn't brought their poll numbers down to the mid-30s and they were really worried that the legislature that they had bought might be willing to sell them down the river.
So, you know, these are the things that we need to do on a national level.
And by the way, the good thing about Republican governors in some of these states has been that they have expanded choice significantly.
They need to take the next steps.
And with a federal government that could condition educational funding on taking those new steps, which is what I would do as president, you can encourage even more people, I think, to be able to do some of these reforms that have shown to be effective.
Alright, so let's turn to, I guess, what strikes me as the second most crucial element on your list of policy issues.
And that would be foreign policy, especially in relationship to what's happening in Ukraine and with Russia.
And so, that's obviously a terrible conundrum and a terribly dangerous situation.
And so, the first question I guess I would have for you with regard to that issue is, How do you think we got ourselves into this mess?
We had a chance in the 1990s, I believe, to have pulled Russia firmly into the sphere of the West.
And we seem to have bungled out somewhat irredeemably.
And now we have this terrible war in Ukraine that seems to be settling down for the long haul, as far as I can tell, with the additional danger of emboldening China.
And I don't see, I haven't heard from anybody I've interviewed or really anybody I've talked to, anything that constitutes a reasonable vision for victory or peace.
So two questions, you know.
How in the world did we manage to get into something this idiotic?
And number two, given that we are here and we could have the best possible of all outcomes, whatever that would be, what would those outcomes look like and how would you work towards them?
Okay, so how did we get here?
I believe it was a series of mistakes and mis-evaluations, starting with the Clinton administration.
And every president since then has been guilty of this.
So I think Bill Clinton did not focus as he should have.
I mean, George Bush 41 gave him the opportunity you just spoke about by the Berlin Wall coming down because of the efforts, I believe, of Reagan and Bush 41.
The ending of the Soviet Union and the setting up of at least what was a nominally democratic Russian federation under Boris Yeltsin to try to bring them into the league of fair and just nations.
I don't think Bill Clinton nearly spent the time focused on that that he should have And because of that, because of his distracted focus on foreign policy in other places, I think he missed an opportunity with Russia.
Then I think Bush 43 mis-evaluated Vladimir Putin.
I think you might remember him saying, you know, I looked into his eyes and saw his soul.
Well, he obviously didn't.
Or the soul he thought he saw wasn't there.
Vladimir Putin, from the beginning, in my view, was a former KGB operative who was a czarist Soviet type of leader.
Who was intent on, and he said, that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy, historic tragedy, of his lifetime.
So how do you expect, Jordan, that you're going to willingly have a guy like that give up his expansionist aspirations?
And so under George W. Bush, he was allowed to go back into Georgia.
No ramifications.
Under Barack Obama, he was allowed to seize Crimea and other parts of Ukraine.
No ramifications.
Under Donald Trump, he continued to mass troops on the border of Ukraine, and Donald Trump did not supply, as Barack Obama did not, Ukraine with the type of weapons that could deter Russia from wanting to invade.
And ultimately, Joe Biden, given how badly he botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, sent a signal That he was not up to fighting this fight and Putin made his move to do what he'd always wanted to do, was bring Ukraine back into the Russian Federation.
And so the way we got into this mess was a series of inattentiveness, mis-evaluation, and weakness that was read by Putin as permission.
Because when we didn't fight him on Georgia and we didn't fight him on Crimea, You could say it's reasonable for Putin to conclude that we might not fight him on taking all of Ukraine.
We hadn't made Ukraine a part of NATO, so he had every reason to believe that we wouldn't fight back on this.
That's how I think we wound up here.
I think because of the Chinese involvement in this, remember, before Putin went to war, before he made the decision to go to war, President Xi came to Moscow, met with Putin and said publicly, there are no limits to the friendship between China and Russia. there are no limits to the friendship between China and Well, Putin took that to mean exactly what it meant, which was that China would financially support Russia to go in and take Ukraine.
And so we are now seeing a proxy war.
The appropriate conclusion of the war is to have Ukraine have the ability to drive Russia out of, in my view, the newest parts of what they've taken of Ukraine and then to negotiate the newest parts of what they've taken of Ukraine and then to negotiate the borders and to, thereafter, one of the things that we're going to do is to
once the war has ended, to admit Ukraine to NATO so that Russia would now know that there was a price to pay for For their invasion and their barbarism of their invasion.
And that price is that now Finland is a member of NATO on their border.
You've got, and if you add Ukraine, this is a much worse result than Russia could have ever expected on their border, but they brought it on themselves.
And I will tell you also that having just gotten back from Ukraine 10 days ago, I can tell you that the barbarism that's gone on there by the Russian army is unspeakable.
The murder of civilians and burying them in shallow graves, the gouging out of eyes while people are alive, cutting off of ears, and in my view, Jordan, worse than anything.
20,000 children, Ukrainian children, have been kidnapped by the Russian army and sent to Russia to be reprogrammed to work against Ukraine.
I met some of these mothers who have had their children taken away from them.
They don't know whether their children are dead or alive, whether they're being cared for or abused, and whether they'll ever see them again.
These are the type of things that America cannot permit an authoritarian regime to do to a free country And to do so with impunity.
And we need to send a message, the West as a whole needs to send a message with American leadership that that's not permissible.
Because if we don't, Putin will not stop there.
Remember, the Russians have always wanted to have Poland because Poland was the way that they were invaded in both world wars.
And they have wanted that level of buffer.
So I don't believe, if we permit this, that he'll stop at Ukraine, that he'll continue to try to reassemble, as best he can, the old Soviet Union.
So the concerns for me in that regard are twofold.
And you outlined a bit of what might constitute a vision for victory.
First issue is...
After World War I, Germany was severely punished for its expansionist proclivities, and that resulted in the Treaty of Versailles.
And that was designed to permanently weaken Germany.
And that turned out to be, that vindictive treaty turned out to be a very, very, very bad idea.
So, attempting to permanently weaken a powerful industrial economy, we have some historical precedent for assuming that that might breed exactly the opposite result.
So I've talked to hawks on the American side who think that the investment of tens of billions of dollars so far into Ukraine, if the consequence of that was the weakening of Russia's military might, then that was a small price to pay.
But the Treaty of Versailles issue lurks in my mind as a counterexample.
Now, we might hope for regime change in Russia as a consequence of the difficulties of this war.
But again, if you look at Russia historically, it's by no means obvious that Putin is the worst leader that Russia has ever had.
And plus, it's also...
strikes me as risky to destabilize the conventional forces of an extremely powerfully armed nuclear enemy, given that once the normal courses of warfare are exhausted, the conventional forces, the nuclear option given that once the normal courses of warfare are exhausted, the conventional forces, the nuclear And so it seems to me that we may be tempting Russia in that direction.
And then finally, it's not obvious to me at all that the Russians will give up these newer territories.
You're speaking of the Donbass, I believe, and the territories on the eastern side.
Now, I don't know ever when I'm reading reliable information from that area of the world, but my understanding is there is some degree of support among the local population, especially the Russian speakers, for the Russian, what, incursion into those territories.
And so, And I'm not trying to justify that.
That's not my point.
I'm trying to lay out the complexities.
My sense is that Russia regards these as rightful territories of their state and that they'll be very, very loath to give up any territory.
It's hard for me to imagine that Putin could do that as well without having to declare something like defeat, which is a very unlikely thing for him to do, given all the options he has in front of him.
Why do you think it's realistic to assume that with sufficient pressure the Russians will give up those eastern territories, Donbass, and to what degree are you concerned that pushing in that direction will tilt the Russians towards, well, one option is obviously the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield.
And so, I see way more ways of this getting out of hand than I see ways of it proceeding towards something approximating a reasonable conclusion.
So, I'll leave you with that mess of questions to juggle.
As you say, a lot to unpack there.
So, let me start...
I believe where you started, which is I am not advocating for a Treaty of Versailles with Russia, and I'm not advocating for intentional destabilization of Russia or demilitarization, which is an absolutely unrealistic goal, which is what happened to the Germans in the near term after the Treaty of Versailles.
So I'm not advocating for that at all.
And I do think that there are real concerns about advocating for regime change, because in Russia, the devil you know may be better than the devil you don't.
And we've seen that through history.
So I'm not advocating for either one of those things.
And I want to be clear that I'm not saying that victory would look like regime change in Russia.
I am concerned about them as a nuclear power being destabilized.
And so I'm not advocating for those things.
What I am saying, though, is that we have not yet tested fully how much military pressure can be put on Putin to get him to concede some of those areas on the eastern side and the Donbass.
We have not armed them enough.
Let me give you an example.
When I was in Ukraine 10 days ago, President Zelensky told me that on the average day in August, Russia is shooting 56,000 artillery shells into Ukraine.
Ukraine is responding with 6,000.
Now, almost an 11 to 1 problem is not giving Ukraine what they need to be able to prosecute the war in the most effective way they can.
And so I think Joe Biden has given them enough evidence Just enough not to lose, but not enough to win.
And so part of what I think we need to do here is to give the Ukrainians the ability to prosecute the war in the way they see fit.
And then see how Russia reacts.
It may be once we've armed Ukraine sufficiently, For them to meet all of their strategic goals militarily, that Russia still will not concede some of those areas.
Well, then that's when you sit down and have a conversation with your ally about what's the best deal we can make here to bring this to a conclusion.
But you can't convince them, the Ukrainians, it's in their interest to do that when you haven't given them the ability as they see it, and I think just given the numbers their right, to be able to prosecute the war in as aggressive a way as it's being prosecuted against them.
And so if we're in, we need to go all in from a hardware perspective.
The other reason to do that, of course, Jordan, is the message it sends to China vis-a-vis Taiwan and other areas in Asia, that they need to see that we are willing to stand up and allow an ally to have what they need to have to aggressively prosecute their own defense.
And China's watching very closely on this front, and we need to send that message both as a country and as an alliance.
Very clearly to them.
And by the way, I believe if we had done that early on in Russia, we wouldn't be in this circumstance with Ukraine.
And we should take that as a lesson for China and Taiwan and other areas in Asia.
So I think that tries to answer specifically a number of the things that you laid out in your questions.
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Okay, so I'm going to ask one more question with regard to foreign policy, especially pertaining to Ukraine.
So, the cynical part of me thinks...
In relation to the dangers of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about back in the 1960s, that the war...
The endless war of attrition in Afghanistan came to a halt under Biden.
And that put the military contractor types in a difficult position because the endless market for their wares had now dried up.
Well, now we've got a situation where we have a war in Ukraine that's settling down to be a very, very long and drawn out battle.
And you said yourself that Biden has sent just enough to the Ukrainians not to lose, but not enough to win.
That certainly makes the possibility of a long, drawn-out and hyper-expensive war paramount.
So one of the things I'm wondering about is, do you think that the president, with his relatively short-term in power...
And the multitude of his potential responsibilities and division of attention, as was the case with Clinton.
Do you actually think that the president can step into a situation like this, a new president, with enough power and credibility to stand up against the continually active implicit forces agitating for expensive war?
Yeah, I think not only can you, but you must.
Now look, part of the reason this is going to be a longer war is because Obama, Trump, and Biden have all failed to arm the Ukrainians quickly.
I mean, think about this, Jordan.
They're now talking about F-16 training and saying it's going to take until next summer.
To train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s?
This is absurd.
And it's the result of wanting to drag it out.
So I think your suspicions in that regard could be alleviated If we had acted more quickly, and I still think we can act quickly now.
The Russians are still on their heels here.
You have to believe that Putin believed that he'd be flying the Russian flag over Kiev by this point.
He's not anywhere close to that.
And so we still have an opportunity by aggressively arming them to shorten this conflict.
If we continue to do what we're doing, you know, what past is prologue, and if we continue to act the way we're acting now, and the war is not coming to an end but is at a stalemate, well, then you either have to, you know, act differently or you're going to continue to have stalemate.
So you either have to withdraw completely And allow the Russians to completely take over Ukraine, which is unacceptable to me, or you have to ramp up the hardware you give so that you can try to bring it to a speedier conclusion.
Now, if you try that and it doesn't work, then negotiation is going to be our only way of ending this.
And we'll have a significant say in that matter, given that we have treated our allies fairly and appropriately in giving them a chance to win the war and say to them, we gave you a chance with, you know, much of what you've asked for and you haven't been able to get it done.
So we need to now step in and help to negotiate a conclusion to this.
But until we do that, we are absolutely consigning ourselves to a stalemated situation here.
So that's why I would be more aggressive.
If you acquired the presidency, what priority would addressing this conflict become?
And then also, given your strategy of sending additional military aid to Ukraine, how do you protect yourself and your country against the possibility of getting their sleeve caught in the terrible machine and being dragged in completely?
Because there's obviously, well, you can see the complexity there.
So, you know, how much of this, how much would this be a priority for your administration?
And what do you do to stop the U.S. and the West as a whole, the rest of the world, from getting dragged into what could be a catastrophic conflict?
Let me go in reverse on your questions.
The first is, my view, the way to avoid getting dragged in is Two-fold.
One, to make very clear that there is not a circumstance under which I would send American soldiers or NATO soldiers to Ukraine.
But secondly, to arm them sufficiently so that it would not be necessary.
It is inaction.
It is timidity that gets that sleeve caught into the machine of war and gets you dragged in.
Not the aggression of saying, we're going to give you, Ukraine, every resource you need from a hardware perspective to prosecute the war you think can be winnable, short of forces.
Now, on the flip side of that, you know, in terms of priorities, It would be a top three priority from a foreign policy perspective.
You know, the first priority is our relationship with China.
Now, obviously, that's interwoven with Ukraine, but we have many other issues that we need to deal with with China in terms of intellectual property, in terms of our relationship with Taiwan, in terms of our need to make sure that the Chinese in terms of our need to make sure that the Chinese are not sowing discontent around the Climate issues with China.
There's a lot of issues that we have with China that we have to deal with.
That would be a top three priority.
Secondly, I would also be looking to shore up our other alliances around the world as one of the parts of dealing with our Chinese relationship.
We should have a better relationship with India, and we should be working on that.
We should make sure inside our own hemisphere that we are dealing with some of the challenges that go on that don't only affect us internationally, but domestically.
We live in the best neighborhood in the world, Jordan, with Mexico and Canada on our borders.
But we need to strengthen that both economically and geopolitically to make sure that we deal with some of the issues that we have inside our own hemisphere.
So it would be a top three priority along with strengthening alliances and dealing very directly with China on the issues that are very, very important to us and to the Chinese going forward.
You know, they're the second largest economy in the world.
We've become very interwoven, and we need to acknowledge that fact and work in our own national interest to make sure that the terms of that relationship are ones that give us the opportunity to be as successful as we can be.
So let's turn...
We are somewhat tight for time here.
So let's turn our attention.
I'd like to talk to you about law and order and about dialogue between Republicans and Democrats.
Maybe we'll leave that aside for a moment, though, and concentrate more on the Republican side of the race for the moment.
So...
As far as I can tell, the frontrunners are Trump, obviously, and then DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Haley, you, and Tim Scott.
You guys look like you're all possible genuine contenders.
Maybe somebody else will pop up.
As we move forward, the polls I looked at indicate that Trump's running at about 48 to 50%.
DeSantis, 12 to 16.
Ramaswamy, he varies a lot, say, between 6 and 12.
You, Pence, and Scott, somewhere between 3 and 7.
And Nikki Haley, at about 2 to 4.
Now, there's a lot of variability in the polls, and I don't know how accurate those figures are.
But you can kind of identify...
Maybe.
Who's going to be part of the actual slate?
Now, you were quite close with Trump.
You helped organize his campaigns.
You headed the contingent that established his presidency to begin with.
My understanding is that you became particularly skeptical of Trump as a consequence of his failure to fully accept the results of the I think that's the right place to go next and then talk about the other Republican contenders.
Then I'd like to shift our attention, if we can, to the Biden scandal and the Biden presidency in general.
It'd be a shame not to hit that.
So maybe we could take about seven minutes to address the Trump I want to ask this question.
You know, Trump has been pushing this notion that the election was stolen.
And when I talk to my Democrat informants, they tell me that the evidence for that from a legal perspective is nil.
And it's very difficult for me to evaluate that.
But then I look at it from a broader perspective, and I think this is where Trump is a genius.
And he's put his finger on something, which is that there are a lot of terrible shenanigans.
On the Democrat side of the universe during the last election.
And I think the worst of those was the squelching of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
That was really crazy.
To call that appalling is to barely say anything at all because that laptop's quite the damn mess and God only knows what the Bidens have been up to.
And that story was squelched very conveniently in relationship to timing of the election, which was a very tight election.
So Trump might be wrong that the election was stolen in a legal sense, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about it being stolen in a moral sense.
And so Well, so that's complicated.
And you worked very closely with Trump.
And so I'd be more than happy to hear whatever you have to say in relationship to those questions.
Well, look, I was saying at the time that the Hunter Biden laptop should have been a story.
But you know what, Jordan?
There are unfair things perpetuated by the media against Republican candidates all the time.
And we do have a media bias in our country.
There is a liberal media bias.
There's no question about that.
And the problem, though, is when you're a Republican, you've got to be tough enough to deal with it and not be a whining child.
And my problem with Donald Trump is now all of a sudden the problem is, well, because they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop I lost, how about the fact that you monumentally botched certain elements of our response to COVID? How about the fact that your conduct while you were in office absolutely poisoned the well with millions of suburban women in this country who had voted for him in 2016 and found him to be an absolutely
unacceptable alternative in 2020?
I mean, much of what we're talking about here was self-inflicted.
And having been as close to him as I've been over all these years, I can tell you that there were many of us who were telling him that while he was in the midst of doing it.
But he doesn't listen, Jordan.
He doesn't take advice well.
He is incredibly self-consumed and stubborn.
And, you know, much of what happened to him in 2020 could have been avoided if he had listened to lots of good advice which was available to him and was being given to him and he refused to accept it.
And he has morphed this into, if his argument was the campaign was unfair, that's an argument that I think a lot of us could buy into.
But he doesn't say that.
I mean, if you look at a recent interview we had on Fox News with Brett Baer, and Brett asked him about those suburban women that he lost in 2020, and if he were the nominee, how would he get them back in 2024?
His response was, I didn't lose in 2020.
So I don't know what you're talking about.
So what do you think he did to lose those women?
His conduct, Jordan, his abrasiveness, his failures on the COVID front, and his failures to keep his promises.
Look, this is a guy who said he was going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
He had a Republican Congress.
He didn't get it done.
This is a guy who said he was going to balance the budget in four years.
As preposterous as that promise was, He still did much worse.
He added $6 trillion to the national debt in four years, the worst fiscal record in four years of any president in American history.
He said he was going to build a wall across the entire border of Mexico and the United States and that Mexico was going to pay for it.
And instead, he built 52 miles of new wall in four years and we haven't gotten our first peso from Mexico.
He said he was going to drain the swamp, Jordan.
And instead, all he did was rearrange the swamp and make room for his own family.
Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka, six months after he leaves the White House, gets $2 billion from the Saudis after he made Jared a central part of negotiations in the Middle East when he had two very capable secretaries of state in Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo.
Why was he doing that?
It's all part of the grift, the grift that allows him to spend $40 million of his own money that he raised from middle-class donors who thought they were donating to him to help him get re-elected president on legal fees as a billionaire.
He's not spending his own money, he's spending $100 donors' money.
So I think all of those things became apparent.
During his time, and a lot of suburban women just said, sorry, we gave you the benefit of the doubt in 2016 because we didn't like Hillary Clinton, and we thought you might actually drain the swamp and do the things you said, but you didn't do them, and in the process of not doing them, you also offended us in the way you conducted yourself as president on a personal level, and so they left.
And I don't think any of that will change Jordan in 2024 if he's the nominee.
Because all he's doing is talking about the past.
You don't hear him talking about the future.
All he's doing is he's still litigating the 2020 race.
He does that in 2024, which is what he's been doing so far.
Joe Biden will get re-elected, and that will be a calamity for this country to have an incapable 82-year-old president going to 86 and With a completely incompetent vice president.
Okay, so let's turn.
I'd like to dwell on Trump a bit more, especially in relation to the Abraham Accords.
But I think instead we'll turn our attention to Biden.
And so Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted out a few days ago something I thought was extremely ominous, which was his suspicions that...
The question of whether or not we're tangled up in the Ukraine war as a consequence of the Biden family's financial dealings has now been laid on the table.
And as far as I can tell, there's been a pretty stunning series of revelations emerging out of the investigation into the Biden family that they have taken substantial amounts of money in a multitude of We're good to go.
It's so shocking to me to see this unfold that it's simpler for me to believe that this is mostly mud throwing and muckraking on the Republican side.
Now, I don't believe that it is, but I can certainly understand how it would be reassuring for people to believe that This is all smoke and no fire.
Now, if Biden himself has been tangled up in the Biden family business dealings, which seems to me highly probable given that I can't understand what other value Hunter Biden himself would bring to the table, then we have a scandal of a proportion in the White House that should make what's happening to Trump look like a sideshow, and yet that isn't happening.
And so, how are you reading these revelations about the Biden family Financial dealings with foreign, particularly with foreign actors.
And what do you think it entails?
Both of these families need to go, Jordan.
Both the Trump family and the Biden family, who have placed themselves and their own personal and pecuniary interests ahead of the interests of the country.
You know, look, $2 billion to Jared Kushner for what exactly?
His extraordinary investment acumen?
You know, you can ask the same questions about Hunter Biden.
What value is he bringing to the table?
Except for his relationship to his father.
Now, I do think the Vivek stuff about that's why we're involved in Ukraine is laughable.
We were involved in Ukraine well before Joe Biden never got to the White House.
Donald Trump was sending weapons to the Ukrainians.
I don't think anybody thinks that that was based upon some pecuniary interest Donald Trump had.
And our European allies are involved in this as well.
So I think this is Vivek just...
Being him and throwing that out there, the same way he threw out that, you know, he doesn't think we know everything about 9-11 and the government hasn't told us everything.
And then he had to backtrack significantly off of that post that he put up with one of the longest posts I've ever seen, trying to explain away an irresponsible comment.
Let's get to the real point here.
Both the Trump family and the Biden family have put their own pecuniary interests of their own families ahead of the interests of this country.
And for Hunter Biden to have access to getting his father, while he was Vice President of the United States, on the phone with these business folks, that's what he was selling.
It wasn't the illusion of access, as some of the Democrats say.
It was access.
He got him on the phone to talk to these clients, and as a result, these clients paid him significant amounts of money.
Now, whether the president, now President Biden, got some of that money or not, I think we should continue to investigate and find out.
But my point to you is that when you've got Donald Trump Jr.'s fiancé getting paid $60,000 in campaign money to give a three-minute speech on January 6th, when you have campaign money donated by regular Americans paying $108,000 for Melania Trump's stylist,
when you've got them paying $250,000 to refurbish his plane, There is examples of grift in both of these families that are breathtaking.
And every bit of it should be investigated.
That's why I was calling for a special counsel quite some time ago to investigate the entire Biden issue.
I'm very disappointed that they appointed the guy who was obviously either completely incompetent or in the tank on the Hunter Biden plea so badly that a judge rejected the plea.
But we should be investigating the Biden situation just as aggressively as we're investigating the Trump situation.
And I'm tired of the whataboutism.
It doesn't make Trump's stuff not troubling.
His stuff is just as troubling as Biden's stuff.
They both need to be looked at.
And my view is that both of these families are past their sell-by date.
We need to move on from both Trump and Biden.
And by the way, 75% of the American people agree with that.
They don't want a Trump-Biden race in November 24.
So the Biden stuff is serious, and it needs to be examined in every way, including whether the president, while he was vice president or during the period he was a private citizen, was profiting from what Hunter Biden was up to.
I know that when you were governor, I've been thinking here while you were talking about why you might be credible on the...
Anti-family dynasty side of things, let's say.
And, you know, I don't know any details about your own family and about whether or not you might be someone less amenable to that kind of pressure.
But I do know that you ran what appeared to be a pretty effective anti-corruption campaign when you were attorney in New Jersey.
And so maybe you could tell people a little bit about that and then...
If you have anything to say in closing to sum everything up that we've been talking about and to, you know, what, put in a final word to the people who are watching and listening, we're going to switch over to the Daily Wire side for another half an hour for everyone watching and listening, just so you know, talk about some...
Of Mr.
Christie's autobiographical history, get to know him a little bit better, but we're going to close this one up relatively quickly.
So, what did you do on the anti-corruption front in New Jersey?
What did that teach you about conducting such investigations and then what do you have to say in conclusion?
Well, thanks for bringing that up.
Look, I'm the only person who's going to be standing on that stage who's had any experience dealing with law and order and dealing with the issue, in particular, political corruption.
It was a huge problem in New Jersey when I became U.S. Attorney there in 2002, and I dedicated a significant amount of resources to it.
And what were the results?
We brought 130 in seven years, 130 prosecutions.
For political corruption against both Republicans and Democrats.
And the results, Jordan, we were 130-0.
We did not lose one case.
Not one case was dismissed.
And the reason for that goes to my overall philosophy on this.
You approach these problems without fear, favor, or partisanship.
You can't fear how big the person is that's being examined.
You can't favor someone because they're powerful or rich.
And you cannot ever allow partisanship to get into the middle of it.
Corruption is corruption no matter who is performing it.
I remember the first case I did involved the frontrunner for United States Senate on the Republican side in New Jersey in 2002.
And a Republican official called a friend of mine when I brought the case and said, what the hell is he doing?
I thought he was one of us.
And my old law partner said to him, you don't understand, Chris.
He's not one of us.
He's going to do what he thinks is right.
And I think what it taught me was that the only way to make law and order efforts in this regard seem fair and just is for them to be fair and just.
And complete without fear, favor, or partisanship.
So if I became president, Jordan, I'm going to appoint an attorney general with two instructions.
One, pursue every matter that's appropriate to pursue without fear, favor, or partisanship.
And two, don't come and ask me anything about any criminal investigation that you're doing.
The president has no business being involved in it.
And when I was governor, by the way, even though I had lots of opinions about what my attorneys general were doing or not doing, they'll all tell you publicly that I never once picked up the phone, nor did anyone on my behalf call and ask them anything or urge them to do or not do anything in a criminal investigation.
That's the only way the public can have faith in it.
In the end, I think what we need as a president is someone who actually knows how to get things done, who actually has a record of being able to work with both sides and accomplish things, who is unafraid to use the bully pulpit in a way that is appropriate to move opinion both of the people that who is unafraid to use the bully pulpit in a way that is appropriate to move opinion both of the people that
And someone who believes that it's harder to hate up close and that what we all need to do is to work together to try to get things accomplished in this country.
Our country was set up, Jordan, constitutionally, as you know, to be an argument.
That's fine.
As long as the argument leads to a result.
Right now, we're living in a world of small arguments about things that are just meant to inflame and divide.
My presidency is going to be about big things of consequence to make our country better 50 years from now, not five minutes from now in the next news cycle.
Well, sir, that seems like a good place to close.
I'm going to flip to the Daily Wire Plus side of the interview now for everyone watching and listening, so you can join us on the Daily Wire Plus platform if you would.
Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.
If you're inclined, you know, a few months down the road, four months, five months, six months down the road, when you're more in the midst of the presidential campaign and there'll be all sorts of new things to discuss, I'd be more than happy to Talk to you again.
We can see how this goes and how people respond to it, but that offer's open.
I'm very curious.
This is going to be a remarkably dramatic and interesting presidential election.
I think we haven't seen the likes of this in our lifetimes.
You and I, we're about the same age, and so it's going to be something to see it unfold.
Thank you very much for talking to me today and for sharing your thoughts with my viewers and My listeners and thanks to all of you who are in fact watching and listening.
Your attention is much appreciated.
Thanks to the Daily Wire folks for making this possible as they always do and for making it work out so professionally and easily.
And on to the Daily Wire Plus side.
Very nice to talk to you, sir.
Thank you.
Looking forward to it, Jordan.
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