He doesn't deserve the time of day to say it, but Chris Christie, who's challenging Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, is making an ass of himself.

A look at what the former governor of New Jersey been up to makes one want to close the barn door quickly to what's going on in that animal house.

According to The Hill:

 Chris Christie turned up his rhetoric on fellow presidential contender Donald Trump in an interview Sunday, branding the former president as a “petulant child” and a “loser.”

The former New Jersey governor appeared on CNN’s State of the Union, where he tore into Trump’s recent statements on former administration officials such as John Kelly, one of Trump’s numerous chiefs of staff, and former Defense Secretary James Mattis.

“Donald Trump—if you believe what he said when they left, that means he didn’t pick the very best people and doesn’t know how to pick personnel,” Christie said. “If you believe what—about them what he said at the beginning, the great stuff, then this guy is the worst manager in the history of the American presidency. Either way, Republicans should listen to what he says. He’s a petulant child when someone disagrees with them.”

Christie further blasted Trump’s etiquette on a potential debate stage, repeating his promise to treat the Republican National Committee’s pledge to support the eventual 2024 nominee “just as seriously” as when Trump refused to acknowledge it during the first Republican debate in 2015.

“I will do what I need to do to be up on that stage to try to save my party, save my country for going down the road of being led by three-time loser Donald Trump,” Christie said, citing Republicans’ performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022. “Loser, loser, loser.”

Can he give us a little 'nyah, nyah, nyah' to go with it? 

That's the problem with this guy. 

I get what he's trying to do here: He's trying to out-Trump Trump on the childish name-calling front, giving as good as he gets.

"Loser, loser, loser!"

Trump has done that and we'd rather he didn't, but that's his individual thing. Where Christie runs into trouble is when he tries to play the other side, too -- which is that of the sober adult decrying Trump's bad manners.

"He's a petulant child when someone disagrees with him."

So which is it, Chris, the nyah-nyah name caller, or the Mrs. Grundy scold, decrying Trump for his childishness?

The whole thing makes him look like a phony, a guy who's having his cake and eating it, too, so to speak.

He's quite the projecting guy, in fact.

He decried President Trump's hiring skills, calling him "the worst manager in the history of the American presidency."

Sure, Trump had issues. He has the chaotic style of a hotel manager of a big city hotel, which he kind of is, and he's probably not the easiest guy to work with, either.

But this, coming from the guy who had an aide who literally shut down traffic on a critical New Jersey bridge to New York to get back at a political rival? A guy who hires those kind of people and isn't very effective at keeping their political payback games out of the news? Maybe he should look at his own hiring and management record first.

It rings hollow, like an over-inflated balloon after a thump, because every obnoxious thing Christie accuses Trump of doing is something doing himself.

The writer of the piece asks what's his big plan , or rather ...

he offered few concrete plans for his own potential presidency.

That's why he can imitate Trump all he likes, and yes, there are some things Trump does that we would rather he not do, but he comes out looking like an idiot.

Behind that veneer that Christie loudly tut-tuts as Trump's childishness, voters know that Trump also has a track record, and that track record is what matters to voters.

Trump's the one who made us energy independent, taking the petrotyrants completely out of the picture as global power players and begging for mercy. Trump's the one who shut down surging border traffic and at least got started on construction of the border wall. Trump's the one who had nations falling all over themselves to make friends with us, getting along with even unexpected nations, such as Mexico and its rock-socialist president. Trump's the one who was perceived as so unpredictable, Putin didn't want ot take a chance on invading Ukraine, which he dearly wanted to do. Trump's the one who brought speedy prosperity to our country, meaning, people made money and had not just jobs but their choice of jobs, which meant record-low unemployment rates and record-high job participation -- particularly for women, minorities, handicapped people, and even ex-cons. Trump's the one who figured out a way to cut the bureaucracy through changing the civil service rules. Trump's the one who figured out how to win over black, Latino and other supposedly rock-hard constituencies of the Democrats over to the Republican side for votes. Trump's the only one who ever seriously supported and spoke out against abortion as the evil it is. Yes, he made some mistakes -- COVID, the nasty, sneaky, disloyal, scheming personnel he picked, his failure to get major election integrity measures done before they could get him on that front. But by and large his accomplishments outnumbered his mistakes and even more impressively, he did all this with one hand tied behind his back, as his political enemies employed every dishonest, dirty, trick in the book to thwart him before going down in flames of their own making.

Christie has nothing like that to speak of based on his own political record, so his bid to imitate Trump's edgier traits falls flat, an immensely annoying copycat act, with zero political muscle behind it, just a lot of flab.

What's he polling at these days? Zero? One percent? He needs to shut his fat trap at this point and just go away.

Don't run for president, Chris. Just run.

Image: Screen shot from Face The Nation video, via YouTube.