Trump, Christie feast on insults in New Hampshire

NEW LONDON, N.H. — Politics, it's been said, can often resemble a food fight.

On Tuesday, it was quite literally a fight about food — and which Republican presidential contender has the worst eating habits.

Former President Donald Trump and Chris Christie spent a day trading highly personal barbs about each other's weight in near-dueling campaign events in New Hampshire. The former called the latter a "fat pig." The latter retorted by mocking the former's preference for overdone meat.

It was campaigning at its most guttural form — hardly an amuse bouche for those Granite State voters with a more elevated palate. But, as befitting the situation for the longtime friends turned recent political foes, they are turning to such low-brow fare at a critical moment for both of their campaigns.

Trump returned to the first primary state on Tuesday in the shadow of another indictment, eager to rally his supporters — and to get his rivals to stay in line behind him.

And Christie, the field’s loudest Trump critic, likely won’t get the chance to berate his favorite foil in real time in the first debate, should the former president follow through on his threat to bypass the event in two weeks’ time.

So Christie had to settle for the next best thing on Tuesday: bashing Trump from a town hall just 66 miles away from the former president’s own appearance in New Hampshire.

“Our poor New York City billionaire, so picked on,” Christie said as he ticked through Trump’s growing list of criminal charges.

“Literally the same time I’m walking around Ukraine, he’s waltzing into a courtroom in Washington, D.C., to tell us he’s being indicted for us,” Christie continued to light chuckles from the group of roughly 200 people who came to hear him at Colby Sawyer College. “How lucky are we that we have such a selfless, magnanimous leader?”

Christie called Trump “morally responsible” for Jan. 6, 2021. And he taunted Trump with his well-worn line about the then-president retreating to the White House as his loyalists stormed the U.S. Capitol to eat a “well-done hamburger.”

Earlier in the day, Trump mercilessly mocked Christie’s weight to supporters packed into a high school gymnasium in Windham, N.H.

“Christie, he’s eating right now, he can’t be bothered,” Trump said to laughs and cheers from the crowd.

“Sir, please do not call him a fat pig. That’s very disrespectful,” Trump said, pointing to an audience member who had shouted out in response. “I’m trying to be nice. Don’t call him a fat pig. You can’t do that.”

The back-to-back events in New Hampshire on Tuesday could be the closest the Republican rivals get to sharing a stage for some time. Trump, far and away the polling frontrunner in the GOP field, has repeatedly talked about skipping the Aug. 23 debate, hosted by Fox News, in Milwaukee.

“I don’t know, if you’re leading by 50 and 60 and 70 points, do you do that or not? I don’t know,” Trump said.

But some of his supporters in Windham, N.H., were of a different mind. When Trump asked the crowd whether he should take part in the first debate, he was met with a roar of mixed messages. “NO,” some thundered. “YES,” others cried. Thumbs-down gestures toward the front of the room gave way to thumbs-ups toward the back.

“Maybe we’ll do something else,” Trump said. “Some people say yes but they hate to say it. It doesn’t make sense to do it if you’re leading by so much, but they like it for entertainment value because they’re selfish.”

Christie has called Trump a “coward” for not saying whether he’ll debate. His allied super PAC, Tell It Like It Is, took out a full-page ad in the Union Leader newspaper on Tuesday accusing Trump of being “afraid to debate” and has been running digital ads saying the same.

“Let’s see if he respects you enough to show up,” Christie goaded Trump at his town hall. “It’s not about me. … It’s about you.”

But Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc., and a former New Hampshire congressional candidate, dismissed the pressure from Christie as coming from a “disgruntled former friend of the president” who “has a vendetta against Trump. And voters see right through that.”

“Frankly, it doesn’t matter” if Trump debates, she said, because either way “he will win the primary.”

The debate stakes may be higher for Christie, who sits in the low- to-mid single digits in polls, trailing both Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. But on Tuesday, Christie settled for egging on Trump from afar. The former New Jersey governor, freshly back from a trip to war-torn Ukraine, dismissed Trump’s pledge to end the Russian invasion in the first 24 hours of his second term as kowtowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And he tore into Trump’s mounting legal troubles hours after the former president sought to discredit the criminal cases against him as “bullshit” and accuse the Biden administration of weaponizing the Justice Department against him.

“I’m sorry I won’t be able to go to Iowa today, I won’t be able to go to New Hampshire today, because I’m sitting in a courtroom dealing with bullshit,” Trump said as the crowd rose to their feet and chanted the expletive back at him.

As Trump played off raucous rally-goers clad in red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps and T-shirts with fake mugshots plastered across them, Christie sought to level with a much calmer crowd of plaid shirts and polos.

“If Donald Trump loses in New Hampshire … he’s finished,” Christie said of the state that handed Trump his first primary win in 2016. “You in this state will be able to make that determination for the Republican Party.”

While Trump and Christie spent the day beefing with each other, there was one topic they seemed to converge on: disdain for DeSantis.

But even that came with caloric underpinnings. Christie echoed a line from Trump’s top strategist comparing the Florida governor to the soft drink “New Coke,” which Coca-Cola brought out to much fanfare in the 1980s before it fizzled out.

“If Coke comes out with New Coke and Coke is still available, well you’re going to buy Coke,” Christie said. “Ron DeSantis is New Coke. If Coca-Cola is no longer available, maybe New Coke would get a little traction. But you still got people who like Coca-Cola.”

Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.