Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Christie is saying everything right, and the Republican Party wants nothing to do with him.

This conflict between 2024 Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie and the other Republican candidates vying for the slot almost certainly to be filled by Donald Trump and Republican voters came to a head in the fourth and final 2023 Republican debate, hosted by News Nation. Chris Christie was brutally booed by the audience of that debate when he said, “Hey, you know what, we’re all going to go vote next year. And that’s something Trump may not even be allowed to do, because he’s going to be convicted of felonies, and he’s going to lose his right to vote.” And the crowd booed and they went crazy, and nobody else on stage agreed with him.

We have an extraordinary situation right now. Chris Christie, from the beginning, has been the one candidate who is not running for second place. He is not auditioning to be Donald Trump’s vice president. And he has been by far the most honest and direct about the crisis facing the Republican Party.

The Republican Party failed in 2018, failed in 2020, failed in 2022, failed in November’s 2023 election, and now they seem destined, 60-plus percent of the Republican primary electorate supports Trump, they seem destined to select the guy facing four criminal trials [and] 91 felony charges to be their nominee. Chris Christie thinks this is a bad idea. Chris Christie is not beating around the bush.

While Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley at the most recent debate said “Well, we need someone from a younger generation,” without saying Trump is unfit to serve because he’s constantly forgetting who’s president and what war would be the next world war, Chris Christie is willing to say he’s unfit to serve, whereas the other candidates pay lip service to Trump and say he was a great president. But here’s something on the fringes as to why you should vote for me. And maybe Trump will pick pick me as his VP, Chris Christie doesn’t want to be Trump’s VP. He says this is the absolute wrong direction for the Republican Party. And he’s polling 2% or 3%. Republicans do not want to hear it.

And so the question we arrive at is, what, if anything, will it take for the Republican Party to abandon Trump? And the answer is the same answer as to what will it take for Trump not to be the nominee? Only if Trump dies? Is this going to change? When we were watching the News Nation debate, along the bottom of the screen, News Nation said things like “pivotal fourth Republican debate,” and the reality is pivotal fourth Republican debate if Trump dies. Trump has not had the decency or respect for the Republican voters to show up to even a single debate. And Chris Christie pointed that out, and the crowd booed. But he is absolutely and totally correct.

And it is almost like a drug at this point in time, the Republican electorate at large, 60% of it right, enough to make this guy the nominee, they are not going to get off of their addiction to Trump until there’s no more of the drug left. Now there is a real question as to what would happen in a November 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump. The defenders of Biden say the polling simply doesn’t matter at this point in time. The defenders of Trump say Trump’s killing Biden in these polls, it’s 45 to 40. He’s killing them. If you look at the polls, honestly, and you look at how accurate polls are 10-11 months before an election, there’s 10% to 15% of the electorate that is still in the “I don’t know” or third-party category. And as a result of that, I do think it is way too early to say anything completely definitive about what the polling tells us. But what we should be assuming, and this has been my message to the people on the left, what we should be assuming is that Trump absolutely can win. Whether he will win is a different question.

But if anybody in any state is thinking about staying home because Trump’s going to be in prison, or they’re not going to vote for him, or Trump might not even survive, who the hell— any of those excuses or justifications to do anything other than to register, if you need to, and to plan to vote, risks four years of pseudo-dictatorship under Donald Trump. So we can’t control this addiction that the Republican voters have. Chris Christie tried to do an intervention, they booed him down to hell. We can’t control any of that. What we can control is: Are we registered? Are we going to vote to make sure Trump doesn’t become president again?