Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who once spoke at a white nationalist conference, took issue with what she deemed to be a “racist” incident at Wednesday’s GOP primary debate.
“I was pretty disgusted at Chris Christie and his racist comment towards Vivek Ramaswamy,” Greene said during a discussion on Right Side Broadcasting Network at the event, hosted by Fox News, in Milwaukee. “He compared him with Obama. I honestly thought that was pretty racist.”
Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, called out his rival on stage after the entrepreneur basically recycled a line used by former President Barack Obama.
“Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?” Ramaswamy had said.
Obama famously called himself a “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too,” during the 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech when he was running for the U.S. Senate.
Christie pointed that out, saying: “I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT.”
“The last person in one of these debates … who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama,” Christie said. “And I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur.”
Greene attended the debate as a surrogate for Donald Trump, who was absent.
Ramaswamy has been loudly pro-Trump on the campaign trail and repeatedly defended him at Wednesday’s event. Christie, on the other hand, was the former president’s most vocal critic on the stage.
Greene apparently wasn’t fazed about actual racism and bigotry when she spoke last year at the America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, organized by prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes; when she told two Muslim colleagues in Congress to “go back to the Middle East”; when she falsely claimed Obama is a Muslim and “opened up our borders to an invasion by Muslims,”; and when she told supporters that undocumented immigrants are “replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school and, coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture.”