The Reason Chris Christie Says Trump Was Furious At Barack Obama

Years before anyone ever imagined Donald Trump's political ambitions would ever actually come to fruition — let alone lead him to even a single term as a U.S. president — the one-time real estate scion's campaign against former President Barack Obama served, in retrospect, as a harbinger for the things to come. In 2011, Trump, then a relative social media newbie, sent off the first of many tweets which would kickstart the birtherism movement, a racism-infused conspiracy theory that first questioned, then refuted, that Obama was an American citizen born in Hawaii. 

Though Trump later backtracked on his well-entrenched stance in 2016 — all the while claiming that he had been the one to "bring this ugly incident to its conclusion" by forcing Obama to make his long-form birth certificate available to the public, per NBC News – the damage was done. The birther movement that Trump helmed helped foment the seemingly ever-expanding world of right-wing conspiracy theories ranging from QAnon to a sort of birtherism renaissance, this time with Vice President Kamala Harris as its target.

Despite it all, Obama's response to Trump and his birthers at the time was even-keeled, given the circumstances; in 2011, Obama even went as far as to poke fun at both Trump and his Twitter-fueled movement at the White House Correspondents' dinner. And according to a new tell-all authored by a former Trump acolyte, it seems it only added more fuel to the birtherism fire.

While former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's upcoming book "Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden" isn't necessarily a tell-all about Christie's time as a lackey for Donald Trump, it contains at least one excerpt which reveals how Barack Obama's public lampooning of the Trump-led birther movement possibly affected the Trump administration's future platforms and policies. According to Insider, Christie writes that a series of jokes Obama made during the 2011 White House Correspondents' dinner about birtherism — many of which were aimed directly at Trump himself — rendered Trump so furious that it spurred the former reality star to run for office in 2016.

According to Christie, Trump was "pissed off like I'd never seen him" after Obama — having then recently produced his long-form birth certificate – chided that Trump, who was in attendance at the event, was finally free to pursue other conspiracy theories (among them the moon landing, the deaths of "Biggie and Tupac," and Roswell). As Christie recounted, Obama "never turned his eyes away from the man who'd been questioning his right to be president," a move that had Trump "beside himself with fury." Per Christie, this defining moment solidified Trump's later decision to run in 2016; not only that, it "paved the way for wave after wave of other conspiracies to come, wild fantasies, far-fetched assertions, bizarre allegations, and outright lies."