"He's not Voldemort from the Harry Potter books."
That's Chris Christie expressing bafflement over the reticence of his fellow Republicans to publicly attack the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named front-runner of the primary race.
That's Donald Trump, if you were wondering. See it wasn't that hard. But with only 11 days to go before the Iowa caucuses, the first voting of the GOP contest, the ex-president's top rivals are still unwilling to raise his biggest potential liability in a general election — his four looming trials and 91 criminal charges.
As one Iowa voter put it to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a written question at a Gray TV town hall Tuesday: "Why do you protect Trump? What are you scared of?"
DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley are getting a little braver. Haley is calling Trump a liar over campaign ads that she says misrepresent her record. And DeSantis is complaining that his former political mentor is scared to show up to debate him on television.
But as these rivals battle for second place behind Trump — who appears headed for his third-straight GOP nomination — they will speak only euphemistically about the anti-democratic elephant in the room. Haley bemoans the chaos and drama that surrounded him in office — in the most understated and oblique nod to Trump supporters' mob attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. DeSantis argues that Trump would be a "high risk" nominee because his chances of getting elected given his past are small — despite recent swing state polls showing the former president leading the current one. And DeSantis says he'd be a less distracted implementor of Trumpism in the Oval Office than its author.
All of this gets Christie's goat, and he ridicules Haley's chaos dodge. "What? What does that mean exactly, governor? Why not say it?" the former New Jersey governor said at a recent event in New Hampshire, before going on to compare the ex-president to the dastardly scourge of the wizarding world in J.K. Rowling's books.
Christie — who backed Trump in 2016 — is a rare Republican candidate who has dared to attack Trump, branding him unfit to be president and calling his hardline immigration rhetoric "disgusting." And what has it got him? An outside chance to win the New Hampshire primary — where independent anti-Trump voters could be important — but rock-bottom poll numbers in every other primary race.
Christie's plight answers his own question. DeSantis and Haley are running scared of Trump because they are worried about alienating Republicans who thought he had a good presidency and are still sympathetic toward him. Even many GOP voters who tired of Trump's endless tantrums and challenges to the rule of law still empathize with the former president and don't like seeing him criticized.
Which raises two other questions that may be answered in the next few weeks:
— Why go through the exhausting, often humiliating process of running for president if you can't use the most potent political material against your top rival?
— And given his still staggering popularity among Republican base voters, was Trump ever beatable in the 2024 nominating contest?
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