Attack Ad with Trump's Mug Shot Hits the Airwaves - Chris Christie PAC Behind It
The only shot former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has at the Republican nomination is to take shots at Donald Trump — because taking shots is all he’s good at.
Christie is, for all intents and purposes, an insult bot. He takes to the debate stage, hones in on the most vulnerable target, and unleashes. This worked in 2016, when he effectively destroyed Marco Rubio’s campaign by saying the Florida senator could do nothing but reiterate a “memorized 25-second speech.” Rubio then went on to, unfortunately, prove his point.
The great irony, of course, is that Christie can do little more than reiterate memorized five-second insults. This time around, his target was conservative activist Vivek Ramaswamy, who he compared to Barack Obama and who, Christie said, “sounds like ChatGPT.” But he was picking on Vivek because the only insult target Christie has that can give his campaign a needed boost — former President Donald Trump — wasn’t there last Wednesday.
But if Christie can’t use one of his rehearsed zingers on the GOP front-runner, one of his super PACs can certainly use the latest politicized prosecution against Trump in a nasty smear ad.
According to NBC News, the 30-second spot by Christie-supporting Tell It Like It Is PAC is the first commercial to use an image of Trump’s mug shot in campaign advertising.
“Tired of the drama, the distractions, the lies?” the narrator of the ad said over the mug shot and other minatory-looking grainy black-and-white footage of Trump. “It’s time for conservatives to win again.”
The ad noted that, as a prosecutor, Christie “convicted child pornographers” and, as New Jersey’s governor, he “took on the teachers union and won.”
“A real conservative, Christie tells the truth — and he’ll beat Joe Biden easily,” the ad claimed.
Well, according to the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate, he can’t even beat the candidate he says sounds like an AI bot — along with Trump and three other politicians.
The numbers don’t lie: As of Wednesday morning, Trump sits at 53.6 percent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 13.5 percent, alleged ChatGPT imposter hologram Ramaswamy at 7.3 percent, former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley at 4.9 percent, former Vice President Mike Pence at 4.6 percent, and Christie — the guy who’ll “beat Joe Biden easily” — at 2.5 percent.
Money doesn’t lie, either — and former President Trump raised over $9.4 million since the mugshot was taken on Thursday, Fox News reported Tuesday evening. That brings his total August haul to over $20 million.
I guess “Tired of the drama, the distractions, the lies?” wasn’t actually a rhetorical question.
As for Christie, numbers on his fundraising are way less splashy (and somewhat more vague). Tell It Like It Is PAC, in its first filing with the Federal Election Commission, had raised $5.9 million between the launch of Christie’s bid in June and the end of July, according to Politico.
But, at least he’s getting play from the numerous anti-Trump “conservative” groups that still maintain an active presence on social media — like Republicans Against Trump:
Watch the first attack ad in American history featuring a former president’s mug shot.
“Tired of the drama, the distractions, the lies? It’s time for conservatives to win again.”
A new ad from “Tell It Like It Is,” a super PAC supporting Chris Christie for president. pic.twitter.com/e82QyxEVxl
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 29, 2023
Take the fact they’re echoing Christie’s message, put it together with the website URL of Republicans Against Trump — reps4biden.com — and see if you can figure out who the former New Jersey governor is really helping.
Given this, I was almost certain the granddaddy of the “conservative” anti-Trump organizations, the Lincoln Project, would retweet this, too — but I guess they were all too busy not screening their board members for allegedly grooming young men with promises of jobs in exchange for sex, or whatever it is they do, to catch this one.
The point is that Christie has neither the resources nor the numbers to have a “lane” to the Republican nomination. His last win in an election came nearly 10 years ago at this point — and while it’s a kind of state tradition for New Jerseyans to generally loathe their governors by the time they leave office, Christie’s approval rating as he was set to depart the governor’s mansion in Trenton was a historically low 15 percent.
Christie’s response, according to Politico? “I don’t care.”
“The poll that matters is when people actually go in and vote,” Christie told reporters at a June 2017 news conference. “It would be nice if people actually polled voters or people who are likely to vote, because everybody else’s opinion, quite frankly, doesn’t matter about whether you like a public official or you don’t — unless you’re willing to move forward and exercise that preference at the polling places.”
Unfortunately, polls generally do reflect reality — and the reality remains that, if you average out all the national surveys, Christie has to make up 51.1 percentage points on Donald Trump to take the lead.
Putting Trump’s mug shot — a photo which, contrary to Christie’s hopes, seems to have solidified support for the former president, not diminished it — in an advertisement isn’t the way to start closing that huge gap. Turns out Republicans aren’t “tired” of what Christie wants to paint as “drama,” “distractions” and “lies.” Nice try, though.
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