Donald Trump’s Former Ally Chris Christie Called Rudy Giuliani a

In this daily series, Newsweek explores the steps that led to the January 6 Capitol Riot.

“Stop golfing and concede,” Republican Governor of Maryland Larry Hogan tweeted at Donald Trump on Sunday, November 22. Hogan said the president’s “ridiculous challenges that are not based on fact need to end.”

“We’ve always had a peaceful transition of power,” he said on CNBC.

“The president has been saying for months that all mail-in voting was going to be bad and that they were going to be cheating. And look: if there are issues and problems, we ought to root them out,” Hogan said on PBS‘s Firing Line.

Donald Trump responded, of course, in a tweet: “Report: Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Anti-Trump Hero, Paid for Flawed Coronavirus Tests from South Korea via @BreitbartNews. This (Republican In Name Only) will never make the grade. Hogan is just as bad as the flawed tests he paid big money for!”

“If you had done your job,” Hogan tweeted in response, “America’s governors wouldn’t have been forced to fend for themselves to find tests in the middle of a pandemic, as we successfully did in Maryland. Stop golfing and concede.”

Hogan had been a consistent and outspoken critic of the president.

But Chris Christie? The former governor of New Jersey and an early Trump ally? He appeared on ABC‘s This Week calling Trump’s lawyers a “national embarrassment,” saying they were relying on false conspiracy theories rather than evidence of voter fraud. “If you’ve got the evidence of fraud, present it,” he said.

“I have been a supporter of the president’s. I voted for him twice. But elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen.”

Christie and presidential campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani then had a bitter phone call.

On that Sunday, several more prominent Republicans also called for Trump to end his legal challenges, to concede and to start cooperating in the transition process. Former Ohio Governor John Kasich, who ran against Trump in 2020, and John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, said it was important for more Republicans to speak up.

Michigan Representative Fred Upton, a Republican, told CNN the voters in his battleground state “spoke” by choosing Joe Biden.

North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican, said on NBC that it was “past time to start a transition.”

Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, also a Republican, said Trump should concede because his lawyers had “exhausted all plausible options.”

Hope Hicks, the longest-serving Trump political aide, who had returned to the White House in March 2020 and was an active member of the Oval Office entourage, told the president that he should start thinking about his legacy–that focusing on the election too much ran the risk of distracting from all the good he had done. She didn’t ask him to…