From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, January 11th.

The most important moment on the night of CNN's Republican presidential primary debate in Iowa,

may have come a little before the debate even started when former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie dropped out of the race and said this.

I want to promise you this.

I am going to make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump

to ever be president of the United States again.

And that's more important than my own personal ambition.

Christy fears for us all what another Trump presidency could bring and he means it.

Christie did accidentally step on his message a little,

though, despite the heartfelt speech we just sampled from there, when he was accidentally caught on

tape saying something quietly to someone about the remaining challengers to Trump, Nikki Haley,

and Ron DeSantis. This begins with what Christy said about Nikki Haley. And she's going to get smoked. And you and I both know it. She's not up to this. She's still 20 points behind Trump in the future, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. And he's still going to carry Iowa. Yes. Oh, he's, you know, I talk to Desantis called me.

Petrified that I would. He's probably getting out of Iowa.

So we weren't supposed to hear that, but we did.

Haley's going to get smoked and she's not up to this, he said.

DeSantis called him and he's petrified.

Still, though, Christie's exit could actually help Haley beat Donald Trump in New Hampshire next week, and that would be huge.

We'll talk about that.

But once again last night, the two candidates in this last debate before next Monday's Iowa caucuses did not want to say much about the guy who declined to appear.

It wasn't for a lack of trying to get it out of them, though, by CNN co-moderator Jake Tapper.

Governor Haley, when Governor Christie dropped out of the race just a few hours ago,

he said the most important issue is, quote, the character of the candidate.

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