Sure, it was very satisfying listening to Chris Christie slice and dice Donald Trump but Christie made clear he’s looking out for fat cats, while happily trying to make life harder for the rest of us. Host Shannon Bream seemed delighted.

Christie argued that he’s a viable candidate for president because “people in the Republican party and quite broadly across America are tired of having political candidates who are snake oil salesmen,” Christie said. He was referring to Trump but it also applies to his plan to cut Social Security.

Still, it was fun to hear Christie smack down Trump the way you rarely hear on Fox, including from their Democratic contributors.

CHRISTIE: I was there in 2016 when Donald Trump said he was going to repeal and replace Obamacare and failed to do it; when he said he was going to build a big, beautiful wall across the entire border of Mexico and then Mexico was going to pay for it. We’ve got a quarter of a wall and not one peso from Mexico; when he said he was going to balance the budget in four years and added six trillion dollars to the national debt; and now, yesterday in Iowa, telling people that he would solve the war between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours. The only way he could do that is do what he normally does, which is bend down to Vladimir Putin and get him whatever he wants.

There was more of that which you can watch in the video below.

Assuming Christie means it this time (unlike in 2016 when he similarly filleted Trump, then bent the knee after dropping out of the presidential campaign) that does not mean he won’t be pandering to the right-wing.

That’s exactly what happened in the rest of the interview.

Christie tries to scare viewers into supporting cuts to Social Security

It started when Bream brought up Social Security. “You are one of the few willing to talk about entitlement reform, about potential changes to programs like Social Security,” she said. “How do you sell it to people?”

Christie started in with the usual right-wing lie that Social Security must be cut in order to save it - that also seeks to scare everyone into going along.

CHRISTIE: Well, you sell it to people because in 2034, Shannon, if nothing is done then there will be an automatic, by law, 24% cut in Social Security benefits. So, I want every Social Security recipient out there right now who intends to still be receiving those benefits going forward to see what a 24% cut in their benefits would mean.

We need to look at all the different options to try to fix Social Security.

Christie lies about how to protect and preserve Social Security

Got snake oil? Christie doesn’t really think we need to look at all the different options. In his very next sentence, he took one big one, probably the most popular and practical one, off the table:

CHRISTIE: We don’t need to look at raising taxes, we’ve got plenty of taxes right now in this country, but we need to look at things like, do the extraordinarily wealthy need to collect Social Security? I mean, do we really need to have Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk collecting Social Security and others that are very, very wealthy?

And here’s some more snake oil: while Christie is suggesting that “raising taxes” would raise taxes on everyone, the progressive plan is to raise the Social Security payroll tax for very high earners. Biden has proposed this, albeit not in his current budget, according to The New York Times. Here’s what I wrote when Sen. Bill Cassidy tried to scare Fox News Sunday viewers into thinking (falsely) that cutting Social Security and Medicare is the only way to save them:

The New Republic delves into various possibilities but the short answer to saving the programs without cutting them amounts to this: eliminate the $160,200 income cap on Social Security and Medicare taxes, otherwise known as FICA tax. As it stands now, TNR notes, LeBron James pays the same flat tax of 15% as the rest of us but only on $160,200 of his $44.5 million salary. To put it another way, $44.3 million of his salary is exempt.

Christie's plan would hurt Social Security

Here's some more Christie snake oil: Means testing makes Social Security more expensive and less popular. From the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Universal participation and the absence of means-testing make Social Security very efficient to administer. Administrative costs amount to only 0.5 percent of annual benefits, far below the percentages for private retirement annuities. Means-testing Social Security would impose significant reporting and processing burdens on both recipients and administrators, undercutting many of those advantages while yielding little savings.

Finally, Social Security’s nearly universal nature ensures its continued popular and political support. Large majorities of Americans say they oppose cuts to Social Security because they value it for themselves, their families, and millions of others who rely on it.

Christie says he wants to eliminate Social Security for the “extraordinarily wealthy” but in all likelihood he really wants to kick off a lot more people from the program. The New Republic notes that cutting off Social Security for people earning more than just $140,000 a year “would eliminate more than 10 percent of the shortfall.” So more than 90% of the shortfall would still be with us. To put it another way, there are probably not enough multi-billionaires to make their removal from Social Security and Medicare result in the kind of cost savings needed.

So, what Christie probably has in mind, but won’t say so, is to make Social Security a program for the poor. And we know how much Fox and their Republican pals hate programs that help the poor. So once Social Security doesn’t benefit the well-to-do, you can start the clock ticking on right-wing attempts to weaken it further or destroy it altogether, which has long been the ultimate Republican goal.

Christie wants to raise the age for collecting Social Security, too

But wait, there’s more snake oil! Christie is using his fear-mongering to scare people into agreeing to raise the retirement age for Social Security – and not just for the ultra-wealthy.

CHRISTIE: When you look at the age of retirement, you don’t want to change that for people

And also, when you look at the age of retirement, you don’t want to change that for people who are now in their 50s or 60s. That would be unfair. They wouldn’t have time to plan. But I say this: I have a son who will be 30 years old this fall. If we change the Social Security age for somebody like him and he can’t figure out how to plan for that over the course of the next 35 years, he’s got bigger problems than worrying about what his Social Security benefits are going to be.

Notice how Christie is already smearing those who may not have been able to save enough so as not to need Social Security?

Christie presents his cruel plans to make life harder for most Americans as an asset

And now for the final snake oil: Christie pretends his plans are only because he loves Social Security:

CHRISTIE: We need to be real about this, Shannon. And I don’t hate Social Security, I love Social Security and that’s why I don’t want to see a 24% cut in benefits because we were too timid and too afraid.

[…]

I want to take on the big problems in this country and solve them for the American people.

I drafted most of this post last night. Today, when I took a break from finishing it, I saw that my Crooks and Liars colleague, Susan Madrak, had posted today about this same interview. She made an excellent point that I hadn’t thought of: plenty of ex-wives of “garden-variety millionaires,” often dumped for younger trophy wives, need and deserve money from their ex-spouse’s Social Security. So there would likely be bad repercussions for the no-longer-wealthy, too.

Bream challenged none of Christie’s Social Security hocus pocus. Instead, she changed the subject to Fox’s uber obsession, Hunter Biden. Christie pandered to the MAGA crowd here, too. He called the Hunter Biden investigation in Delaware, “either a lie or it’s incompetent.” I hope to address the Fox attacks on the Hunter Biden investigation at a later time.

I suppose I should be glad they didn’t baselessly accuse Hunter Biden of being the owner of the cocaine found in the White House recently.

You can watch the entire interview below, from the July 9, 2023 Fox News Sunday.