Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie launched his 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday and wasted no time throwing punches at former President Donald Trump.

Christie officially filed the paperwork early in the afternoon before speaking with a group of voters in New Hampshire where he repeatedly hammered the former president on a variety of issues.

Christie went through a list of things that the former president promised to do while in office, but did not accomplish. At the top of the list, Christie repeatedly criticized the former president for not completing the border wall.

The former governor also took multiple swipes at Trump’s character, saying that the former president never admits when he is wrong and always blames and attacks those around him when things go awry.

“Beware, because that leader not only will not serve you, they will not be able to find anybody who will serve them. And a lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog is not a leader,” Christie said. “Let me be clear, in case I have not been already, the person I am talking about who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault, and will always find someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong, but finds every reason to take credit for anything that goes right, is Donald Trump.”

Christie’s pointed case against Trump:
“let me be clear…the person I am talking about who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistakes, who never admits a fault…is Donald Trump.“ pic.twitter.com/GQ7OTQktqn

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 6, 2023

Trump responded to Christie’s announcement with a post on social media: “How many times did Chris Christie use the word SMALL? Does he have a psychological problem with SIZE? Actually, his speech was SMALL, and not very good. It rambled all over the place, and nobody had a clue of what he was talking about. Hard to watch, boring, but that’s what you get from a failed Governor (New Jersey) who left office with a 7% approval rating and then got run out of New Hampshire. This time, it won’t be any different!”

Polling analyst Steve Kornacki said late last month that Christie “probably faces the steepest hill of any of the ’24 GOP candidates” to become the party’s nominee, but signaled that he could do serious damage to Trump.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP

Christie was widely credited with knocking Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) out of the 2016 presidential race with a brutal series of attacks during the Republican debates.

“So while the general assumption is that Trump benefits with every new candidate who enters, I do wonder if Christie could be an exception — that he ends up serving as a battering ram for DeSantis (or whoever has the clearest shot at Trump) in a key moment — a reversal of ’16,” he said. “The effect may not be to boost his own chances of winning, but more to land meaningful blows against Trump that no other Republican has figured out how to land, thereby boosting a non-Trump candidate.”

Republican strategist Mike Murphy said during an interview earlier this month that Christie’s campaign would effectively be Christie “lighting a stick of dynamite and running right at Donald Trump.”

The federal judge who issued a temporary block on portions of Florida’s law protecting children from life-damaging medical treatments in the name of so-called gender-affirming care has a history of thwarting the Sunshine State’s conservative movement.

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida Judge Robert Hinkle defied basic biological science on Tuesday when he concluded “gender identity is real” in a ruling that partially strikes down a law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis last month that bans doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors.

Hinkle, who former President Bill Clinton nominated, ruled that the benefits of treatment with GnRH agonists, or puberty blockers, and eventually with cross-sex hormones, would outweigh the risks despite the substances receiving a warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last year due to potential brain swelling, loss of vision, and other serious risks for children.

“The elephant in the room should be noted at the outset,” Hinkle wrote in a 44-page ruling. “Gender identity is real. The record makes this clear.”

But Hinkle’s latest move comes after other controversial actions in recent years taken by the judge against DeSantis and conservative members of the Florida legislature.

In August 2020, DeSantis suspended liberal Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, a George Soros-funded prosecutor, for refusing to uphold certain state laws and undoing police work, which authorities argued emboldened criminals.

DeSantis also ousted Warren after the attorney pledged not to prosecute women for violating a recently enacted state law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy and would forego criminally charging doctors who perform sex changes on patients in the event Florida lawmakers deemed it illegal.

During a press conference, DeSantis said that he would not allow “this pathogen of ignoring the law to get a foothold in the state of Florida.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP

Nearly four months later, Hinkle ruled DeSantis violated the Constitution, but upheld Warren’s suspension, saying that the governor made false allegations that the Florida attorney had blanket policies not to prosecute certain kinds of cases.

Warren’s removal from office headed to a federal appeals court in Alabama last month, but a final decision has not been made, according to a local Fox channel.

In the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Hinkle dismantled portions of Florida’s felon voting law that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed last year that requires people with felony convictions to pay all outstanding court debts to be eligible to vote.

Although Hinkle did not completely strike down the law, he argued that nearly 775,000 felons with outstanding legal and financial obligations barred from voting violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on poll taxes.

“This pay-to-vote system would be universally decried as unconstitutional but for one thing: each citizen at issue was convicted, at some point in the past, of a felony offense,” the judge wrote in his 125-page ruling. “A state may disenfranchise felons and impose conditions on their reenfranchisement. But the conditions must pass constitutional scrutiny.”

Although former President Donald Trump clinched Florida in the 2020 election by a 3.4-point margin, Hinkle’s efforts did not go unnoticed in the southern Red State.

With Hinkle’s latest move using federal authority to override Florida’s historic legislation that protects children from harmful leftist initiatives such as mutilating surgical procedures, the battle could reach the U.S. Supreme Court in the near future.

Jeremy Redfern, a spokesperson for DeSantis, told Reuters via email that the governor’s office “obviously” disagrees with the judge’s ruling.

“We will continue fighting against the rogue elements in the medical establishment that push ideology over evidence and protect against mutilating our kids,” Redfern said.