- [Narrator] Funding for Governors' Perspectives with Kent Manahan has been provided by NJM Insurance Group, serving the insurance needs of residents and businesses for more than 100 years, Seton Hall University, Seton Hall School of Law, and by Connell Foley, LLP.

[upbeat music] - [Host] Many Americans believe the design and structure of our government need big changes, that according to the Pew Research Center.

Even in these times of growing stress on democracy, Americans generally agree on the importance of democratic ideals and values, freedom, individualism, equality, diversity, and self-government.

On the other hand, there are also many who see the country falling well short in all of these ideals according to the Pew study.

So what does the public worry about?

Polling shows it's a lack of transparency in government, failure to hold elected public officials accountable, and that the fundamental structure of government doesn't work for the current times we live in.

- There really is a test going on in this nation, which is do we believe in the democratic processes, the continuance of government, what has been alighted democracies all over this country?

Do we continue in that way?

Even if it's to the detriment of a party?

- [Host] Political scientists and historians are raising questions about our future.

Is democracy on a slippery slope or can these times become a wake up call?

Can the January 6th insurrection on the US Capitol an all to vivid national calamity and erosion of our democracy push demand for real change forward?

Will election denialism hang around through 2024?

With us now to give us his perspective former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, welcome to the program, Governor.

- Happy to be back with you, Kent.

- Good to have you here.

Governor, let's set the stage a little bit about you.

Your political resume is long.

Started, I think, as a teenager in Essex County volunteering your time for candidates running for office there.

Move forward to Morris County, you win elected office there.

You become the United States attorney appointed by President George W. Bush, two terms as New Jersey Governor Presidential candidate and author, and also you led the transition team for former President Donald Trump in 2016 for a period of time.

- Yep.

- So governor, what should we, the American people understand about the value of our democracy?

- Well, look, I think that, you know, only in times of crisis do I think we appreciate how precious democracy is when things are calm and the, the political waters are relatively calm.

I think people just assume this is the way it's always been and the way it always will be.

But that's not the case.

And so I think then precious nature of our democracy is appreciated when we have times like the last five or six years where there's been a lot of tumult and anger in the country, a lot of division, and we worry about what the impact on our democracy will be.

I'm less worried about that because I think our founders set this up to be an argument.

Everything in the constitution is set up to be contrary to each other, to cause friction and to give balance and have no one get too much power.

And so I think that the founders devised it this way.

There are times when we operate it really well and there are times right now where we don't operate it nearly as well as we should, but I don't think the American people are ready to walk away from the underlying tenants that we have in our democracy.

- Well, you speak of the founding fathers, and I picture them as you're talking in Philadelphia, coming together to talk about the formation of a new government and how it would function.

They were educated men or Jefferson, Washington, John Adams and so forth, and they went back to the Greeks and the Romans and really for almost 2000 years there, there hadn't been a democracy.

But they were so committed to government of the people by the people, for the people.

It's amazing.

- No, it truly is.

When you think back to what they were doing, really writing out a black slate and coming up with something that the rest of the world thought was completely impossible, and quite frankly, a lot of the world still thinks is impossible.

If you go to places like Russia or China, North Korea, Iran, they've come to the conclusion, the ruling classes in those countries have come to the conclusion that the people don't have the right to govern themselves, don't have the ability to govern themselves.

And America stands in stark contrast to that really wrong thesis every day.

- The polls show that Americans are distrusting democracy as a way of government that works for this time for the people.

And it's not just the older generation, it's the, the polls are showing that more and more younger people, whether they identify as Democrats or Republicans or independents and looking ahead to our future, what, what kind of challenges does that lay out, do you think?

For our democracy?

- Well, a lot of, a lot of challenges, but I think that the, what's underlying the tumult now is economic disruption.

You know, you're having a time in our country over the last decade or so since the mortgage meltdown in 2008 I'd say, where people have no longer been economically secure.

Even when the stock market was doing well, even when the economy under President Trump was performing much better than it had under President Obama, people still feel economically insecure.

And in the end, Kent, if you're sitting in your home and you don't know how you're gonna pay your bills, democracy becomes a much less important thing to you.

You wanna support your children, your spouse, and your lifestyle.

And I think that the economic disruption we've been feeling is causing anger out there.

And who are you gonna get angry at in that circumstance?

- [Kent] The government.

- Exactly right.

And so I think that, I don't think that it's a threat to democracy as a concept, but unless democracy figures out how to address the economic disruption, then we're gonna have to be dealing with more of these kind of times.

- But is democracy under challenges right now, given social media how people get their information from cable news, all the talk that's out there without facts being passed off as legitimate information?

Is that challenging?

- It is, but I, I bring it back to those founders.

You know, the 1800 presidential election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was one of the most negative devoid of fact campaigns you're ever gonna want to see.

You know, you had Jefferson's folks calling Adams a hermaphrodite.

You had the Adams folks going after the Jefferson folks on things that were completely without basis in fact.

I think that's always been a part and always will be a part of American democracy.

Here's the difference.

The difference is in those days it happens over a period of days or weeks.

Here it happens like that because the technology we have today and then, it gets settled into someone's mind and you have a hard time talking them out of it.

We can see that with the people talking about the election having been stolen in 2020.

- Well I was just gonna ask you about that.

We're in an age now where campaigns almost are running on untruths.

It's part of a campaign strategy and where are the principles that people are running on?

It's about the untruths it seems to many Americans today.

- Well I think they are concerned about it and I think they should be concerned about the idea that a president of the United States would get behind the seal of the President in the east room of the White House on election night and tell them that the election was being stolen when he had no facts to back that up.

And it's continued as a foreign president to say for two years with no facts to back it up.

- And his followers who run for office, his handpicked people sometimes are doing the same thing in their elections.

- Except Kent, in 2022 what we saw is most of those handpicked followers lost.

And that's why I'm not as concerned about democracy as some other people because across this country, when you saw people like Kari Lake in Arizona, you know, who was clearly running as an election denier and a whole ticket in Arizona that was running as election deniers, they lost.

And the ones who were not running as election deniers, as Republicans won.

And so I do think that the American people are qualitatively looking at what they're being told and many of them are being discerning.

There's still a small portion of my party, I'd say probably 25% that is gonna believe anything that Donald Trump tells them for a period of time.

But I think that will pass too.

But it never passes as quickly as we'd like.

- Well your party governor as we sit here right now is in Washington trying to elect a speaker of the House of Representatives, what a debacle is going on.

Kevin McCarthy has not won so far on sixth, I think they're in their seventh attempt right now as we speak.

What kind of chaos is this?

What, is your view on all of this for the party and how it can lead?

- Well first off, you know, I had someone ask me in a radio interview yesterday about the divisions in our party and I said, well, I don't know, 90% of the Republican caucus wants Kevin McCarthy.

He's got 202 votes and has consistently got that on 222.

That seems pretty unified to me.

And so the first thing we need to look at is let's not let the tail wag the dog.

You have 20 people who don't really know what to demand.

- Who are these people?

- Well, you know, they all got elected, right?

They all got elected in their particular congressional districts across the country.

They belong there, they're entitled to their opinion, but at some point they got elected because of the things that Republicans ran on, lowering energy prices, fighting inflation, closing the border, and doing things that the American people really seem to care about.

Every day they're wasting on picking a speaker is a day they can't be dealing with those issues and those problems.

And so I think that we can't let the tail wag the dog.

The 202 cannot give into those 20.

And that's why I support Kevin McCarthy 'cause I believe he's earned that support.

I hope that when our interview plays that he will be the speaker of the house because 90% of the Republican caucus wants him.

And in our country you can hardly find 90% who will agree on anything, let alone picking the speaker of the house.

So I'm hopeful Kevin will prevail in the fight.

- But what does this do to the party's ability to lead in the house?

- Well, I think the party's ability to lead in the house was hurt by the fact that they only got the 222 seats.

So when you only have a four vote margin, it's very, very difficult, right?

You know, then everybody's a king or a queen and they all want to have their issue at the front and center of the agenda to give their vote.

But what I do think will happen is that not much will happen over the next two years.

- So no compromise.

- No, we have divided government, Kent, and, and I think, look, the Republican house's job over the course of the next two years is to be a stop sign to things they think that the Biden administration and the Democratic Senate are trying to do that are too extreme.

And we're gonna have gridlock for two years and then we're gonna select a new president, a new house, and one third of a new Senate in 2024.

And we'll see what the American people decide to do after watching two years of gridlock.

- But there is some damage.

This goes along with this for the party.

I mean you have to admit that.

- Well of course there's always damage when you don't look like you- - American people are upset.

- I think the American people are paying a lot less attention to the speaker fight than you and I are.

- Probably, but they're hearing about it and it's more confrontation and lack of leadership and lack of getting anything done in Washington.

- I would argue to you that that's what every party who is out of power in the White House winds up having.

During the years that you know, George W. Bush was the president, you had Democrats fighting with each other regularly.

In our system, Kent, the president is the person who writes the hymnal that his party sings from.

And when you don't have a president, then you've got dozens of people writing a hymnal that no one is gonna agree on which hymn to sing.

And that's what you're seeing with Republicans right now.

You've seen it with Democrats.

When we have Republican presidents, we don't have a parliamentary system and because we don't, we have these type of divisions.

But it also means that we can make strong leadership decisions as a president over four years and each one of the presidents in the last few years have done that where they didn't necessarily have great popular support for a policy that they were going to do if you put it up for a referendum that may not have passed.

But that's what our leadership also provides is difficult decisions to be made by presidents and what they believe in their heart is the right thing to do.

That makes our system, I think, a little bit stronger than some of the parliamentary systems.

- Will the party continue to be led by former President Donald Trump?

- I don't think it's being led by Donald Trump now.

I mean look, if you look at all the people he endorsed in 2022, he had an awful record.

Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Kari Lake in Arizona, Tim Michaels in Wisconsin, all losers.

Look, you only lead if you can show people a way to win in politics in our country.

And he has not shown, look, he hasn't won anything since he won in 2016, 2018.

You know, we lost the House 2020 we lost the Senate and the White House.

2021 we lost two very winnable Senate seats in Georgia.

And in 2022 we lost seats in the Senate.

We lost governor's seats and we historically underperformed in the house.

He's no longer the leader of this party.

He's a leader of a section of this party.

And over the next two years there's gonna be a fight over who's the leader of the party.

He may prevail in that fight.

We don't know as we sit here today, but as of today, and you could tell in the speaker fight, he went out and endorsed Kevin McCarthy.

Asked those people who were mostly Trump supporters to support McCarthy and they all told him no.

- So if he runs again, which he has announced his intention to run maybe as a Republican, maybe even as an independent, would you support him if he is the Republican nominate?

- Oh look, I have no idea what he's gonna do, but I will tell you this, I'm gonna do everything that I can to make sure that he's not the Republican nominee for president.

- Let me ask you about Trumpism.

Do you think the Republican party wants Trumpism without Donald Trump then?

- Well, what I think they want are elements of the agenda that he accomplished when he was president.

I think there's no question that they like lower regulation, they like lower taxes, they like strong defense and they like a strong America around the world.

So I think there's those elements they're absolutely for, there's some division on the issue of trade.

But I think that most people believe we have to make sure that things are manufactured in America that we need here in America and can't, as we saw during Covid, depends upon some people in foreign countries to be able to supply that stuff to us.

So I think there's a lot of elements of what the president did that I agree with and support.

But in the end, a leader is not just a set of policies on a piece of paper, it's a persona.

It is the way you lead and how you speak.

- And it's principles and a platform.

- So he's failed that and he's failed.

He failed the test.

Look for someone like me who ran against him in 2016 and then supported him in 2016.

My great hope was that he would rise to the challenge of the office.

He's a smart man.

I've known him for 21 years.

I hoped that that intellect and his success in the private sector would lead him to rise to the challenge.

He didn't.

He failed.

He didn't rise to the challenge, he failed the leadership test.

And as a result of failing the leadership test, you disqualify yourself from being president.

- As we sit here now, governor, it was just about two years ago, January 6th, the insurrection at the Capitol, all of the work that was done by the January 6th committee.

Now that we know more about the testimony that was given by people who worked right in the Oval Office, people who worked for the administration, does the work of that committee do you think safeguard our democracy?

- I think the thing about safeguard democracy much more than the work of the committee is the work that the Justice Department is doing right now.

In the end, the American people are skeptical of anything that comes out of Congress.

We were just talking about that.

And elements of the American people will dismiss anything that's produced by politicians.

But our system of laws is the thing that makes us different than every other country in the world.

And what I'm hopeful of is that the Department of Justice will do what they believe is right and required under the law.

Hold everyone who's responsible for the violence and the threat to our democracy that happened on January 6th, responsible for that.

And I think if that happens, the American people are much more apt to feel secure in that system of laws than they are with some group of people.

And it's not trying to disparage the January 6th committee.

I just think that's the view as we discussed earlier of most of the American people about anything that goes on right now on Capitol Hill.

- So in the name of democracy, the Justice Department should bring charges against former President Trump.

- Well, I don't know 'cause I don't know all the evidence that they have, okay?

- I'm asking your your opinion though.

Based on what you know now, - Well look, my opinion because I was a prosecutor as you know for seven years, is that people who give opinions when they don't know all the evidence are usually pretty stupid.

And we're not gonna be stupid here, Kent.

What I would say to you is I hope that the Attorney General of the United States Judge Garland, that he looks dispassionately at all of the evidence and that he doesn't blink to make sure justice is done, no matter who needs to be held responsible, whether it's a former president or a former staffer or a member of Congress or anybody else who was involved in something that was unseemly, awful and something that should never happen in this country again.

- So how close did we come that day to compromising, to challenging our democracy?

- See, I'm a contrarian on this one.

I don't think that that showed the weakness of our democracy.

I think it showed the strength because here are these men and women who were under physical threats.

- Yes, the Vice President.

- Yes.

People chanting to hang him and yet the vice president never left the building.

Other members of Congress came back by 4:00 AM on the very next day and voted to certify Joe Biden as the next president of the United States.

Let me tell you, that's a pretty strong, vigorous democracy when those people would put their lives on the line to make sure that they did their duty.

And so I think that what the aftermath of January 6th shows us is how resilient and strong our democracy is and how the people in that building, whether you agree or disagree with them philosophically, they went and did their job.

And that's why Joe Biden has sat in the White House for the last two years, which he should be because he was duly elected by the people of this country.

- So all of those safeguards, which you spoke about that exist in our democracy.

But democracy is tough.

It's tough to get business done in a democracy like ours.

So is it time maybe for some kind of changes to ease things up a little bit as some people are talking about, is it time to take a look at our system of democracy and tweak it a little bit- - Hell no.

- Make it- No.

- Hell no Kent.

Let me tell you why.

I think the genius of the founders was to make it hard.

They felt like if a national government was gonna make national laws that were gonna affect all the people in a continental country, that they wanted it to be hard to get that done.

You wanna amend the Constitution, it's hard to do it.

You want to pass a law through the House and the Senate, you gotta have 60 votes in the Senate.

You gotta get a majority in the house and you gotta get the President.

- All those checks and balances.

- Yes.

And I think it's the genius of it.

Where we're failing is person to person.

You know, when I was governor, as you know, I had a democratic legislature for every day of my governorship for eight years.

We philosophically were on other sides of so many issues, but we found a way to get a lot of things done because personally we interacted with each other and we cared about each other and we became friends with each other.

And I think the biggest failing of the current national government is that people are no longer getting to know each other.

This is a people business and the only way you can get things done is to trust the person on the other side.

And the only way to trust the person on the other side is to get to know them.

We're not spending the time to do that anymore.

That's, we are failing the system.

The system's not failing us.

And so we've gotta get better people who are willing to spend the time to be able to create those relationships and be willing to take the risk to do it.

- What have you learned, governor, since the 2020 election, the last presidential election and they know past November election 2022.

What have you learned about the last couple of elections?

What are your thoughts on how the process went and what it means?

- Look, I think that one of the things that's now been completely reinforced in the way I look at politics in this country is candidates matter the most.

And the American people taught us that lesson over and over again.

Is Joe Biden the perfect candidate for president when he ran in 2020 at 78 years old, he wasn't.

But the American people looked at the two options they had and said, no, I trust him more than I trust Donald Trump.

And we're picking him.

In same way in 2022 across the country.

You look at the state neighboring us in Pennsylvania, Senator Fetterman is certainly a flawed candidate and a flawed now senator.

But they looked at his credentials and they looked at Dr. Oz's credentials and they said, no, we're gonna go with someone who we believe is a Pennsylvanian who believes in the values that we believe in.

- And who had health problems.

You're referring to again.

- This health problems of compromised, I mean even saw him take his oath of office, he appeared compromised in being able to repeat the oath.

People are gonna look at candidates though holistically.

And I think the biggest lesson out of all this is if you wanna win as a party, two things, you better stand for something and you better have candidates who can articulate what you stand for.

- You better have principles.

- Right.

And that's standing for something, right?

And then you've gotta be someone who can articulate those things to the American people.

And if you can't, they're not voting for you.

- Well, I think I've read, or I heard you say, I can't remember that you are on a bet that Joe Biden is about to announce his reelection bid.

You've said, I think that at the Democratic National Convention coming up very shortly in Pennsylvania, that he'll use that opportunity to announce his reelection bid.

Does that mean that you are right after that to announce your decision?

- No, I won't be moved by Joe Biden's timing.

But I do think that when Joe Biden picks Philadelphia to be the next meeting of the Democratic National Committee in February, seems to me like he's sending a message.

Being from neighboring Delaware and I, you know, I went to the University of Delaware, I know that region really well and I think President Biden will use that time as my guess to announce he's running for re-election.

And as for me, I'm in no rush Kent.

I don't, there's only one candidate in the race at the moment, Donald Trump.

I think there's a lot of other people like myself considering it, and I don't feel the need to make any decision.

Probably until the second quarter of 2023.

- Your family's behind you.

- My family is very supportive if it's what I want to do.

We're in much different space now.

As you know, our children are almost all grown.

They're all out of the house.

And Mary Pat and I are empty-nesters and so we're in a much different spot than we were in 2012 when they were very young.

We're in 2016 when they were still mostly school-aged kids.

And so yeah, they're fine.

They're- - Sounds like they're moving closer.

- Well there's no doubt that that impediment is that potential impediment is not, the family is all good, but it does not, that's only one part of the decision.

I have to believe that I'm the right person for the job at this moment and I have to see a pathway to winning because, you know, Kent, I'm not gonna do this just for the experience.

I've already had the experience.

- It's a tough campaign ahead.

As you well know.

You've been through it.

Governor, in the last few seconds that we have left, what is your wish for 2023?

Do you have a sort of a new Year's wish for the state of New Jersey for the people in our democracy?

- Oh, look, my wish for the people of the state of New Jersey is that we continue as a state to be diverse, to be strong and smart.

And that we listen to the people who are our leaders and believe them when they tell us what they're gonna do.

And for the greater part of our democracy in our country is that we listen to each other.

There is great strength in listening.

And while I'm a good speaker, I also became, I think, a leader because I'm a good listener and I hope that we listen to each other.

- Well, governor, thank you so much for spending time with us, sharing your perspective on these important issues.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you, Kent.

- [Narrator] Funding for Governor's Perspectives with Kent Manahan has been provided by NJM Insurance Group, serving the insurance needs of residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

Seton Hall University, Seton Hall School of Law, and by Connell Foley, LLP.

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