Donald Trump needs to decide "how serious a candidate he wants to be," and that includes handling how he handles statements like one made during a
town hall event Thursday about President Barack Obama's birthplace and religion, GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie said Friday.
"He's got to decide what he wants to do for himself," the New Jersey governor told NBC's "Today" show. "But would I tell you that if somebody at one of my town hall meetings said something like that, I would say that and say the president was a Christian and was born in this country. Those two things are self-evident."
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Trump has come under fire for not correcting an audience member who told him at the Rochester, N.H. town meeting that "We have a problem in this country. It's called Muslims. We know our current president is one. We know he's not even an American. His birth certificate, man. "
Christie said he would not lecture Trump about what to do, but if the same questions came up at one of his own town halls, he would have told him the audience that he would "clear some things up," as "you have an obligation as a leader to do that."
But still, the election is in its very early stages, said Christie, and just because someone like Trump is ahead in September does not mean they'll be "standing on the stage in Cleveland in July."
Christie, later in the morning on Fox News'
"America's Newsroom," said that while he jumped on Trump and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina for their back-and-forth arguments over their careers, he still would like to hear more about her time at the computer giant.
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"She gave a cursory overview," he said. "Let's see exactly what happened there."
He also criticized Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton's backing of Planned Parenthood, saying that he does not think her stance will attract female voters.
" If Hillary Clinton thinks women in America are in favor of the systematic murder of children in the womb in a specific way in order to maximize the value of their body parts on the open market, I think she is mis-evaluating women in this country," Christie said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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