https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hltns_HHws8
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 discuss the unfortunate and disproportionate of the current administration’s policy to protect the rights of the people of the United States. And we also discuss the challenges that the United States faces We discuss the unfortunate and disproportionate 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 is, why do you think that you would be a good president? What is it that makes you stand out from the other, the rest of the pack say on the Republican side and on the Democrat side as well? Why should people be concentrating on your campaign? Oh, thanks. First of all, thanks for having me on. And I look forward to this kind of long forum 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 wanna be president because I wanna 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 to 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 gonna go into some more detail on that, hopefully later in the conversation. But I wanna 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 wanna 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 send 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 gotta 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, DC. 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 wanna 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 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, the faculties of education have been the most motivated 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 is barely to scrape the surface. They’ve championed whole word reading, multiple intelligences, like a whole emotional intelligence, a whole panoply of concepts that have no scientific standing whatsoever and have done nothing but hurt kids. And they’re likely among the most woke disciplines, the farthest left disciplines that have emerged within the university. Yet they have a hammer lock 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. And why are they allowed to have a hammer lock 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 gonna 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 hammer lock 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 700 a year. So the teachers union was collecting 44,000 a pupil to get awful performance. In the city of Newark, we had 38,000 per pupil. They could have gotten 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 a hundred 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 that 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 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. All right, so let’s turn to I guess what strikes me as the second most crucial element on your list of policy foci 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 on with regard to that issue is, how do you think we got ourselves into this mess? I mean, 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 so, 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 and 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, 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 to Putin 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 find him on Georgia and we didn’t find him on Crimea, you could say it’s reasonable for Putin to conclude that we might not find 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. 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 borders and to thereafter once the war has ended, to admit Ukraine to NATO so that Russia would now know that there was a price to pay 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 could 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. And 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. And 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 counter example. 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 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 is the only one left. 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 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 very unlikely. It’s a very unlikely thing for him to do given all the options he has in front of him. So 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, well, 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 wanna 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 in the Donbas. 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 one 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, 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, they’re 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. Are you looking for an all-in-one e-commerce platform that can help you easily set up and grow your business online? Look no further than Shopify. 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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 gonna 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 Avaka, six months after he leaves the White House, gets 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 20 million is the story at the moment. And 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 muck raking 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, 60,000 in QA, and you’ve got him 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. And I’ve been doing this for 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 what about-ism. 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 for leadership in this country, and 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. 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 to put in a final word to the people who are watching and listening, we’re gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 US 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 and 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 front runner 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 you represent and of their representatives to try to get things done. 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 gonna 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 and for being here 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 is 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. 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 onto the Daily Wire Plus side, very nice to talk to you, sir. Thank you. Looking forward to it, Jordan.