People who view Trump as an existential threat to our democracy should explore every possible way of derailing his candidacy. Everyone assumes Trump would coast to the Republican nomination—and maybe he will. But Cheney and Christie both have the potential to pose a more formidable challenge, and less convenient foils, than any of the candidates Trump rolled over on his way to the presidency in 2016.

For one thing, they won’t be surprised by him this time. For another—and this is key—they can talk…

Running against Trump requires the kind of quick wit and sharp elbows that Christie seems to naturally possess. “He can throw a punch and he can take a punch,” Republican strategist Scott Reed says. Simply put, it may take a bully to beat a bully (or, at least, damage a bully).

But we also shouldn’t sleep on Christie’s electability argument. Trump (no matter what he says) did lose to Biden. What is more, Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia proves that a non-Trump candidate can juice the Republican base and win back suburbanites. This is a point that Christie was hammering long before Youngkin’s surge. This summer, he told the Dispatch podcast that “suburban white voters didn’t abandon us because of issues; they abandoned us because they didn’t want Donald Trump any longer. It was a personal rejection.”