On a CNN segment, hosts showed Chris Christie a clip of Ron DeSantis answering a question in New Hampshire about January 6.
“I wasn’t anywhere near Washington that day. I have nothing to do with what happened that day,” DeSantis said. “Obviously, I didn’t enjoy seeing, you know, what happened. But we gotta go forward on this stuff. We cannot be looking backwards and be mired in the past.”
Christie fired back on the insufficiency of this response:
You don’t have an opinion about January 6, except to say ‘I didn’t particularly enjoy what happened?’ People were killed. People were killed, Kaitlin, as you know that day, on Capitol Hill defending the Capitol. We had members of Congress who were running for their lives. We had people trying to hunt down the Vice President of the United States, chanting, ‘Hang Mike Pence.’ And Donald Trump the entire time sat outside the Oval Office, that little dining room of his, eating a well done cheeseburger and watching TV and doing nothing to stop what was going on until it got to the point where even he could no longer stand it,
Polls indicate that a larger share of Republicans don’t want to see other Republicans attack Donald Trump than want to see them attack Trump. Maybe that’s informing DeSantis’s strategy here.
I think the polls aren’t designed well enough to capture the reality. What I think is really behind the numbers is that GOP voters don’t want GOP candidates to repeat the Left’s criticisms of Trump, or seem to aid the Left by criticizing Trump.
I still don’t think various campaigns will really begin in earnest until the fall. In the meantime, Christie is improving his position in New Hampshire, particularly by appearing dynamic and unafraid in his attacks rather than calculated or shy.