As promised, on Tuesday Chris Christie became the latest challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination. He’s not portraying himself as some Trump-lite. He’s all about tearing his ex-buddy a new one, in a go-for-broke attempt to de-MAGA the Republican Party. Christie entrée into the primary race seems to have broken Fox News. As an example, anchor John Roberts (no, not the Supreme Court justice, that must be confusing for everybody) went off on a bizarre milkshake monologue for which he quickly had to apologize.
As per Mediaite, after Christie formally threw his hat into the ever-widening ring, Roberts, during a group discussion, launched into the longest and most byzantine soliloquy about milkshakes since There Will Be Blood:
We wonder about the net effect on the race, and to use a modification of a metaphor we were using on the panel earlier today. It’s like, you have two milkshakes, right. If the Republican Party is two milkshakes, and this one representing almost half the party — because that’s what the polling shows — has got one straw in it, and that’s Donald Trump’s straw.
And the other milkshake, which represents the non-Donald Trump part of the Republican Party, has how many straws in it now? And now we’re gonna have Chris Christie’s straw in there, and judging by Chris Christie’s physical stature, he could drink a lot the milkshake if he wanted to. But you’re not affecting the Donald Trump milkshake.
For one thing: This is one strange metaphor. For another, Roberts probably shouldn’t have made that little tangent about Christie’s weight. Indeed, even the Fox News host realized fat shaming was not cricket, and he soon stopped the show dead to tell Christie he was sorry:
I just want to take a moment to address something, because I really do feel terrible about it. Earlier on the show, I was making an analogy to describe the Republican voter pool, and I made a comment that I meant to be light-hearted, but I immediately realized was hurtful toward Governor Chris Christie. I should not have said what I said. I deeply regret it and I sincerely apologize to the governor.
Roberts has a checkered if inconsistent past as a Fox News pundit. On one hand, he challenged Kayleigh McEnany when she tried to whitewash her old boss (now enemy) Donald Trump over his comments about white supremacists who like him. On the other, he once spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation after Colin Powell’s death.
(Via Mediaite)