The GOP’s presidential primary has three significant updates this morning, but this is easily the most interesting and potentially impactful. (That’s a low bar, however, as you’ll see shortly.) Chris Christie talked about his now-official entry into the 2024 sweepstakes on ABC’s Good Morning America, and made his strategy clear to George Stephanopoulos.

He’s going to take Donald Trump to the mattresses, both on Trump’s record and Trump’s demagoguery. But pay attention to what Christie doesn’t say in this interview:

"I think there's only one lane for the Republican nomination for president and Donald Trump is the head of it. You need to go right through him and make the case against him. That's what I intend to do…"

Chris Christie talks about his newly-launched 2024 presidential campaign. pic.twitter.com/zAEvWdBm7K

— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 7, 2023

“There is only one lane,” Christie insists, but that’s not entirely true. Trump is his own lane, and Christie wants to obstruct traffic on it. If Christie really thought that only one lane exists, then Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and everyone else would be on it. And yet Christie never mentions DeSantis at all, despite DeSantis’ polling strength — and the estimated $200 million in his war chest.

That says something, I think, about Christie’s real ambition in this primary. If Christie wants to get the nomination, Trump isn’t the only candidate that he’ll have to take down, after all. It’s not as though Christie has the country’s third-largest state of voters that he just won by 19 points in an election. Christie’s last election win was ten years ago, and it produced a second term marred by scandals that didn’t come up in the 2015 primary cycle. Those include Bridgegate, questions about whether Christie politicized Hurricane Sandy relief funds, and that picture of Christie and his family on the public beach that had been closed due to a state government shutdown in July 2017.

In other words, Christie is not just carrying his own baggage, he’s been irrelevant since the early days of the Trump administration. But even when he was relevant, Christie tried this same strategy and it flopped, Politico reminds us, and he was hardly the stalwart rampart against Trumpism he now claims to be:

Christie, who filed campaign paperwork on Tuesday, has spent weeks sharpening his attacks on Trump in preparation for his launch, testing a message that he — and he alone in the growing field of 2024 GOP contenders — has the guts and the skill to knock the former president off his perch atop the party.

The problem for Christie: It was too little, too late when he tried that tactic in 2016. And Republican primary voters don’t seem any more open to it today. …

Christie’s last presidential campaign went down in flames. He logged more visits to New Hampshire than any other GOP candidate in 2016. But he dropped out of the race after finishing in a dismal sixth place in the first-in-the-nation primary with little more than a debate-stage evisceration of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to show for his efforts.

He then turned around and endorsed Trump, becoming the first of his former rivals to do so and setting off a coalescence of GOP brass behind the brash outsider that Christie now says was a “strategic error.”

Christie flip-flopped in order to get consideration for an administration job. He did get named to lead Trump’s transition team but got dropped over the Bridgegate scandal. He reportedly got offered a Cabinet position but wanted to be Attorney General, and ended up with nothing. Nevertheless, he still joined Trump’s 2020 campaign and helped prepare him for the debates against Joe Biden.

Now, however, Christie wants to become the Trump Slayer on the stump, and claims that he will ascend to the nomination if he succeeds. One has to concede that he likely has literally dozens of passionate supporters to boost him into that position. More likely: Christie really does see Trump as an existential threat to the GOP (in 2024 at least) and wants to tear him to shreds and take the heat for it in order for someone else to win the nomination. Christie may not even care who wins it at this point, as long as it’s not Trump. But he has to know it’s not going to be Christie, who couldn’t make the sale even when he was still relevant and before the scandals took place that will certainly re-emerge in this cycle now.

Will it work? It might, if Christie doesn’t cave again. And it will allow all of the vitriol from Trump’s base to attach itself to Christie rather than whoever wins the nomination. As long as that’s what Christie has in mind, well, more power to him, but I suspect the Trumps have a lot of ammunition to deploy against Christie, too.

What are the other major developments? North Dakota governor Doug Burgum threw his hat in the race last night. I can already hear the thundering chorus cry out: Who?

Burgum. You know, the governor just north of Kristi Noem:

When Joe Biden released his video announcing his re-election campaign, it was shocking what was missing. He failed to articulate any economic vision for the country, he ignored the anxiety of families grappling with inflation, and he looked the other way as a recession looms.

We need a change in the White House. We need a new leader for a changing economy. That’s why I’m announcing my run for president today.

My hometown, Arthur, N.D., is a small farming community where woke was something you did at 5 a.m. After earning an M.B.A. from Stanford and working for a short time in Chicago at McKinsey & Co., I moved back home in 1983 and literally bet the farm to provide the seed capital for a startup, which we grew into a world-class company, Great Plains Software.

B-u-r-g-u-m. In fairness, Burgum has an attractive back story and has done a good job in North Dakota, but he’s kept a much lower national profile than just about every other Republican governor in the US until now. (We’ve mentioned him 15 times here at Hot Air before today.) That will change quickly now, but it also means that Burgum is largely untested and unvetted in national media, and that’s not great preparation for a presidential primary campaign. Especially not in this media environment. It’s akin to send a new graduate of Officer Training School to command an army in combat.

And the third development? Mike Pence dropped his campaign-launch video this morning:

I believe in the American people, and I have faith God is not done with America yet. Together, we can bring this Country back, and the best days for the Greatest Nation on Earth are yet to come! 🇺🇸 #Pence2024 pic.twitter.com/A8EkqgCDAm

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) June 7, 2023

I like Mike Pence personally and politically, and this is a very good ad, even if it is a bit paint-by-numbers for GOP candidates. However, it’s still unclear what option Pence thinks he provides Republican primary voters. Without his term as Trump’s VP, Pence would have the same problem as Christie: a lack of relevance and no dedicated popular support in the party. As Trump’s VP, Pence has relevance, but also carries the Trump baggage, whether fair or not. If GOP voters want a return to the Trump years, they can vote for Trump rather than Pence. And if they want change, why would they choose anyone from the Trump administration to deliver it? There are clearly better options for a new direction in this field. Karen will have more on Pence’s entry later this afternoon, so stay tuned.

Also, the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Andrew Malcolm and I discuss the upcoming primary fight and more:

• When Donald Trump slipped on a plane ramp, the national media covered it for days as a potential sign of decline. Joe Biden fell on stage at the Air Force Academy — and the story disappeared entirely.
• Andrew Malcolm and I discuss the media’s wagon-circling around Biden, plus their contention that Biden won the debt-ceiling standoff.
• We also discuss Biden’s serial fabulism about his achievements, and more about the Republican primary fight. Who will win the debate over … debates?

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!