Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said that President Donald Trump “blew it” when he shut down the government with “no plan on how to reopen it.”
Christie made the comments Tuesday night during an interview with CBS’s Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.”
“Where do you think the wheels came off during the shutdown?” Colbert asked of the partial government shutdown that ended last week after lasting for 35 days.
“The President blew it,” Christie replied.
“When?” Colbert asked.
“When he shut the government down with no plan on how to reopen it,” Christie said. “Listen, he — and I said this to him — listen, ‘If you’re going to do this, you better have an exit plan. Because sometimes in politics, things don’t go the way you expect. And so, if it doesn’t go well in the first couple of days, you’ve got to have a way to get it back open.'”
Christie, a longtime ally of the President, said he met with the President in the White House last month before the shutdown began and told him he should make sure something is gained from a potential shutdown.
“I just said to him, ‘It’s OK. It’s the power you have — and if you want to do it. But you just have to have a plan so that you accomplish something by it and then reopen it,'” he said. “And I don’t think — given that it went 35 days — we had a plan.”
The shutdown, which began on December 22, was the result of a disagreement between Congress and the White House over how much money should be allocated to Trump’s proposed border wall along the southern border of the United States. Last week, Trump conceded and agreed to a temporary funding measure that opened the government for several weeks but that does not include the billions of dollars he requested to construct a border wall.
