Chris Christie: Everything You Need to Know
Christie will speak at the RNC tonight.
— -- Name: Chris Christie
Party: Republican
Date of Birth: September 6, 1962
Age: 53
What He Does Now: Governor of New Jersey; chair of Trump's White House transition team
What He Used to Do: Christie is serving his second term as the governor of New Jersey, having first been elected in 2009. Prior to becoming governor, Christie served as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey. He was named to the post by President George W. Bush in 2002 and served in the role until December 2008. Christie also previously held elected office as freeholder of New Jersey’s Morris County.
Hometown: Christie was born in Newark and raised in Livingston, New Jersey.
Family Tree: Christie was born into a middle class family in Livingston, New Jersey, in 1962 to Wilbur "Bill" and Sondra Christie. His father is now retired but worked as an accountant. His mother passed away in 2004 after a battle with lung cancer. Christie's father was active in his son's presidential campaign, door-knocking and volunteering on his son's behalf in the New Hampshire primary. Christie was raised Catholic and remains active in the faith today. He has been married to wife Mary Pat since 1986. The couple met in college at the University of Delaware. They have four children together: two daughters and two sons.
Key Life/Career Moments:
What You Might Not Know About Him:
What He Has Said About Trump:
Christie was once a huge critic of Trump's. That is, until he endorsed him after he dropped out of the race.
Christie endorsed Trump in February, saying, "I absolutely believe that Donald Trump is the best person on that stage to be president of the United States."
But, he has previously said some less flattering things about Trump.
"He has not the first idea of how to run a government, not the first idea," Christie said of Trump on Feb. 7 in Hampton, New Hampshire, when he urged voters to "get off the Trump train before it's too late."
As a candidate, Christie ridiculed the Republican front-runner for having a "make-believe" campaign that amounted to little more than reality TV and sought to remind voters that they aren't electing an "entertainer-in-chief."
"The guy who's running first in the polls. You know it's all make believe, right?" Christie said days ahead of the New Hampshire primary. "It's just not real. It's all for TV."
"Being president is also nothing like being in a fake boardroom in Manhattan and looking across the room and saying, 'You're fired,'" Christie told a town hall in the days before the Iowa caucuses.
In what became a tried-and-true crowd-pleaser, Christie would regularly imitate Trump on the campaign trail, specifically picking apart his proposal to build a wall along the border with Mexico.
"It's gonna be a incredible, beautiful, marvelous wall. An incredible wall," Christie would say, dropping his voice his a couple of octaves to more closely match Trump's tone. "The wall is gonna be unbelievable. The wall is gonna have a door, the door is gonna open and close. The good people come in, the bad people go out."
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