Chris Christie looks askance at Republican loyalty pledge

GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie made it clear Sunday he didn't think much of the requirement that the 2024 GOP contenders agree to support the eventual party nominee in order to appear on the debate stage.

"I'm going to take the pledge just as seriously as Donald Trump took it in 2016," the former New Jersey governor said on CNN's "State of the Union."

"As you'll remember, Reince Priebus had to go up to Trump Tower to get him to sign it, to ask him to do so," Christie added. "He did and then we went to a subsequent debate and we were all asked if we would reaffirm our support of whoever the nominee was going to be by raising our hand. There were 10 of us on the stage, nine of us raised our hands. The one who didn't was Donald Trump."

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, another 2024 GOP candidate, recently challenged the notion of a loyalty pledge, saying he wouldn't support former President Donald Trump, who's hoping to become president again, if he were a convicted felon. “We need to concentrate on supporting the principles of the party, which is the rule of law,” he said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

But the RNC rejected the idea of a carve-out for this scenario.

Christie also told host Jake Tapper that until the era of Trump, whom he repeatedly called a "loser" because of GOP election performances in 2018, 2020 and 2022, it was not necessary for the party to require a pledge.

"I think the pledge is just a useless idea, Jake. And by the way, in all my life, we never had to have Republican primary candidates take a pledge. You know, we were Republicans," Christie said. "And the idea is you'd support the Republican whether you won or whether you lost. You didn't have to ask somebody to sign something."

Pursuing another line of attack against Trump, Christie said the former president has a long history of praising people when he picked them for key positions in his administration and then blasting them afterward when they left his team, mentioning Jim Mattis, Mark Milley and Rex Tillerson, among others. Trump recently lit into former Attorney General Bill Barr after Barr defended the 37-count indictment of Trump.

"He's a petulant child when someone disagrees with him," Christie said of Trump.