Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie said on Sunday that the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) ask that candidates pledge to support whoever wins the party’s nomination in 2024 is a “useless idea.”
“Look, I think the pledge is just a useless idea,” the former New Jersey governor said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“And by the way, in all my life, we never had to have Republican primary candidates take a pledge. You know, we were Republicans, and the idea is you’d support the Republican whether you won or whether you lost, and you didn’t have to ask somebody to sign something.”
Christie said it’s “only the era” of former President Donald Trump, who is also running in 2024, “that you need somebody to sign something on a pledge,” adding that he’s expressed to RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel that he thinks “it’s a bad idea.”
Among the RNC’s requirements White House candidates need to meet in order to qualify for the first presidential primary debate, hopefuls need to pledge to support whoever eventually wins the party’s nomination.
Christie said on ABC that he’ll take the pledge to back the GOP nominee in 2024 “just as seriously as Donald Trump took it in 2016.”
At a 2016 debate, candidates “were all asked if we would reaffirm our support of whoever the nominee was going to be by raising our hand,” Christie noted.
“There were ten of us on the stage, nine of us raised our hands. The one who didn’t was Donald Trump. And so I’ll take the pledge in 2024 just as seriously as Donald Trump took the pledge in 2016,” he said.