Chris Christie on Trump & the “Barbarism” Committed by Putin

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Can I start with Ukraine? You are one of the only, Mike Pence as well, Republican candidates who have been there to show interest in solidarity with the fight that America’s helping them wage. What did you find there? How did it affect you?

FORMER GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE (R-NJ), U.S. REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It’s incredibly emotional experience. You know, I went to Bucha with emotion. When you go to Bucha and you see the cruelty and the barbarism that war has executed by the Russian army, it’s really breathtaking. Stories of civilians, men being pulled out of their homes by the Russian army, their eyes gouged out, their ears cut off, and then murdered execution style in the back of the head and then going into the homes and raping the women. Over 160 people buried in a shallow grave by the cathedral, where the memorial now sets, after the church itself was also ransacked. You then talk about the toll on the children of Ukraine. Verified now, Christiane, nearly 20,000 children kidnapped by the Russian army, repatriated to the Russian federation. The mothers and fathers in Ukraine don’t know whether their children are dead or alive, whether they’re being cared for or abused, and they think that worse. And I met with some of those parents, and I can tell you as a dad of four myself, I don’t know how they put one foot in front of the other with that constant worry. And, you know, the end of that is that, as I sat there, I thought to myself, this is the barbarism that’s being committed by Vladimir Putin. And this is the guy that Donald Trump calls a great leader and brilliant.

AMANPOUR: Well —

CHRISTIE: It’s unacceptable.

AMANPOUR: I was going to ask you what then would it mean if Donald Trump won the presidency again? What would it mean for the people and the battle and the cause in Ukraine?

CHRISTIE: Well, he has said, of course, incredibly, that he would settle the matter in 24 hours. It’s probably the same way he was going to get the entire wall built on the border of Mexico, and Mexico was going to pay for it, and we’ve got 52 miles of wall, and not our first peso from Mexico. So, I give it that much credibility. But what I worry about, Christiane, is that the way he’d settle it is just to turn Ukraine over to Russia, by withdrawing all of our military support and allowing the Russian army to continue to run Rashad (ph) over Ukrainian civilians, kill them, maim them, rape them, and then take this free country and occupy it.

AMANPOUR: So, as a presidential candidate then, because it’s not just Trump, it’s others in the race right now, including independents, we’re seeing the numbers softening for the kind of strong support for Ukraine that they exhibited at the beginning of the war. What would you do now, particularly as CNN is reporting, that a number of western officials and U.S. officials are speaking very pessimistically about the counteroffensive, you know, really open unquestionably whether the Ukrainians can actually burst through and somehow get through the very heavily laid the fences of the Russians?

CHRISTIE: Well, first of all, it would help if President Biden would be out there making the case rhetorically. He’s done better than President Trump has done in terms of providing support, but he has not been out there rhetorically making the case to the American people about why this is so important. And it is important, Christiane, as you know, because China’s funding this war against Russia — for Russia against Ukraine. This is a proxy war between the West and China. And China is going to be watching what we do here. And if we cut and run, believe me, it’s a pay me now or pay me later situation. If we don’t supply the Ukrainians with everything they need to win, then we’re going to be fighting in Taiwan to try to protect Taiwan. And if you don’t care about the Taiwanese either, let me give you a reason to care. Two-thirds of the semiconductor chips in the world are made in Taiwan. Everything from running your telephone, to your computer, to your automobile, to most things in American life, do we want the communist party of China owning two-thirds of the semiconductor chips in the world? And when you talk about support for Ukraine, most people don’t know, in artillery alone, in the average day, Russia is shooting 56,000 artillery shells into Ukraine. Ukraine is able to respond with only 6,000. So, the pessimism that’s being shown by some western officials, I believe, is based upon two bad premises. One, they are ill-informed about how outgunned we are allowing the Ukrainians to be. And two, they haven’t looked in the eyes of the Ukrainian people and President Zelenskyy like I have and know about the results they have. What we need to do is to arm them to win. We need to give them greater artillery, greater anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, and we need to give them F-16s. And if we do that, I believe the Ukrainians can win the war, and that will be a major win for the West and a huge miscalculation by Vladimir Putin.