Chris Christie is almost surely going to make a run at the 2024 Republican primary. He will have to run as the “non America First” candidate because the rest of the crew, DeSantis, Cruz, and Hawley, among many others, are all-in on being as close to Trump’s approach to politics as anyone. So one should consider the source in absorbing Christie’s opinion as to the impact of Trump’s dinner with Fuentes. One I share and wrote about extensively on Substack.

Christie says, from Mediaite:

“This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,”

Christie was even more charitable than most in accepting that Trump may not be lying about not knowing anything about Fuentes:

He can’t stand not having attention all the time,” Christie explained. “And so, having someone show up at his club — even if you believe that he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was — and want to sit with him, feeds the hunger he feels for the attention he’s missing since he left the presidency.”

And to give you just a basis for why this mistake was of such magnitude:

Fuentes, who has also denied the Holocaust, supports “the closure of the U.S. borders to immigrants while opposing “liberal” values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Fuentes views these societal changes as the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed,” according to the ADL.

Worst of all, Trump has no one to blame on this one. Even his excuse that he didn’t know Fuentes isn’t really an excuse. Even more than an indictment (and that’s so weird), this dinner will have a bigger impact on Trump’s election chances. Christie, running for president (likely) himself, is right.

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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman