Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is weighing a run for president in 2028 and has declared the Trump era over, in interviews after the midterm elections that handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. The declaration, blunt even by Christie standards, is the first open break with the president from a Republican of his stature since the midterm results, and it signals that the contest for the party future has already begun.
Why it matters
The timing is deliberate. The midterms delivered a crushing defeat for the Republican Party, and the Democrats now hold the House with their biggest majority in two decades. Christie argument is that the results prove the Trump era has run its course, and that a party that keeps running on the same message will keep losing. It is a case built on arithmetic as much as on ideology: the votes are the evidence, and the evidence is fresh.
Christie is a familiar figure in this argument. He ran against Trump in 2024, lost badly, and withdrew before the Iowa caucuses, and he has spent the years since as one of the few Republicans willing to criticise the president in public. That record gives him credibility with the anti-Trump wing of the party, and it gives him a problem with everyone else: the voters who backed Trump twice are not obviously looking for a candidate who spent two years telling them they were wrong.
What happens next
The 2028 field is still taking shape, and Christie is unlikely to be the only Republican testing the water. The midterm defeat has opened a debate about the party direction that was closed while Trump was winning, and every potential candidate will have to answer the same question: run as a continuation of Trump, or run as a break with him. Christie has answered it first, and in the plainest terms. He has dismissed Vice President JD Vance as a 2028 contender, saying Vance would carry the stink of the Trump administration and could not win the presidency.
What happens next will be decided by whether anyone follows him. A single declaration does not make a movement, and Christie record as a candidate is not encouraging. But the fact that a former governor is willing to say the era is over, in public, on the Monday after the midterms, tells you that the conversation inside the Republican Party has changed. The question now is who else is willing to say it.
