Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie did not appreciate “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski’s criticisms about the GOP debate on Thursday morning, particularly in regards to how the topic of Trump was handled.
For Brzezinski and her co-hosts, the debate was “an embarrassing mess” full of “cringy” and “awkward moments.” But their biggest concern was how little any of the candidates actually called out Trump for his actions. So Brzezinski immediately asked Chris Christie about it during his appearance on the show.
“What the heck was that? What happened last night?” she said bewilderedly. “Donald Trump is the frontrunner. He’s the former president of the United States, a judge found him liable for massive fraud, and he called for the execution of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. How is it that nobody in the room brought that up last night?”
Christie took issue with being included in “nobody” though, and immediately pushed back.
“Well Mika, what I did last night was take on Donald Trump directly as I have all throughout,” he said, running down a laundry list of things he called out Trump on.
He continued, “You know, I only have so much time Mika, I hit all of those things. And so maybe some of the points you wanted to have hit weren’t hit. But I was trying to be responsive to the questions that were asked.”
That wasn’t good enough for Brzezinski though, who came back to the point about Trump posting on social media, calling for the execution of Mark Milley. But, as she raised her voice, Christie got a bit snappier.
“I talked about that this week on social media. I talked about it on other interviews I did beforehand,” he said tersely. “And I — it’s hard for me to believe that I would come onto your show this morning, after what I did and said last night, and that you have criticisms that I didn’t go after Donald Trump enough. Maybe it’s just too early out here in California for me and I didn’t quite hear what you were saying. But come on.”
In response, Brzezinski raised her voice herself, clarifying that she wasn’t calling out just Christie, but every Republican on the stage. Christie wasn’t having that either though.
“Look, the questions were never asked Mika. I’m not going to sit up here and be defense counsel for the other six candidates,” he snapped. “Because I did my job last night. I was the only one who went directly after Donald Trump and all the issues I just spoke about.”
He added, “And I hope that you get these have each one of them on and ask them why they won’t do it. I’ll tell you why they won’t do it. Because they all want to either be Trump’s running mate, or in a cabinet if he becomes the nominee, or becomes the president.”
You can watch the full exchange from “Morning Joe” in the video above.