© David Becker/For The Washington Post
Former N.J. governor Chris Christie speaks at an event in Las Vegas in November.

Former vice president Mike Pence and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie will enter the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination next week, according to two people with knowledge of their plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decisions have not yet been announced publicly.

Pence and Christie plan to announce their campaigns next week, joining an increasingly crowded GOP field looking to challenge former president Donald Trump, who is running for a second term. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) is also planning to launch a presidential bid on June 7.

Pence, whose presidential campaign announcement was first reported by the Messenger, has traveled to key primary states and leaned into issues that other Republicans find politically uncomfortable, calling for changes to Medicare and Social Security and advocating abortion restrictions while highlighting the Trump administration’s role in overturning Roe v. Wade. “We have to resist the politics of personality, the lure of populism unmoored by timeless conservative values,” he told a crowd in New Hampshire recently.

Pence most famously broke with Trump when he refused to interfere with the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win on Jan. 6, 2021, leading some in the pro-Trump mob outside the U.S. Capitol that day to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!” Still, Pence has been restrained in criticism of Trump, simply saying the two may never “see eye-to-eye” over what happened on Jan. 6.

In November, Pence issued a rare rebuke of Trump over the former president’s dinner with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and the activist Nick Fuentes — two people known for a range of offensive comments — saying Trump “was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table.”

Christie’s planned campaign, first reported by Axios, would be his second for the presidency after he unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination in 2016. After dropping out of the race, Christie swiftly endorsed Trump, despite the two men trading bitter attacks through the primary, and later was named head of Trump’s transition team.

However, Christie, 60, has since become one of Trump’s most vocal critics. During a recent town hall in New Hampshire, Christie called Trump “a failure on policy and a failure on character,” asserting that the front-runner in the GOP primary race is nothing more than a television star.

“Everybody can be fooled once by a shuckster, by a TV star,” Christie said. “But if we allow ourselves to be fooled twice, we have no one to blame but ourselves. And let me promise you, if he is the nominee in 2024, Joe Biden will be the president in 2025.”

Christie, a former U.S. attorney who served as governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018, has been exploring a presidential bid for months, expressing his frustration that Trump’s current and potential Republican rivals — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and former vice president Mike Pence — have largely avoided confronting Trump directly.

Who is running for president in 2024? Tracking candidates.

Longtime advisers to Christie have formed a super PAC, Tell It Like It Is, to support his expected presidential bid. The formation of the outside group is being led by Brian Jones, who was an adviser to John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, and is being chaired by Bill Palatucci, a Republican national committeeman from New Jersey and Christie confidant.

Christie and his allies have concluded that the only way to win the nomination is to take on Trump’s vulnerabilities by directly challenging him — forcing him to answer for the campaign pledges that he did not fulfill, according to people familiar with his thinking. Christie is eager to get on the debate stage to prosecute the case against those unfulfilled promises — including Trump’s pledge to repeal Obamacare and his vow to build a wall along 2,000 miles of the U.S. southern border and make Mexico pay for it. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe strategy.

After winning election as governor of New Jersey, Christie was considered a rising star in the Republican Party. Even after the 2014 “Bridgegate” scandal threatened to end his political aspirations, Christie forged on and was frequently named a front-runner to become the 2016 Republican presidential nominee.

During the primary, Christie consistently criticized Trump as inexperienced and unserious. But in a crowded GOP field — and under frequent attack by Trump — Christie’s campaign fizzled, and he dropped out of the race after finishing sixth in the New Hampshire primary.

To the surprise of some, Christie then endorsed Trump, calling him “tough and strong and bold” and saying that the political outsider was the GOP’s best chance at preventing Hillary Clinton from reaching the White House. Christie helped lead Trump’s transition team after he was elected and then returned to New Jersey to serve out the rest of his last term as governor. (A subsequent scandal, dubbed “Beachgate” — in which Christie was photographed enjoying a state-owned beach house amid a statewide government shutdown that had closed the park to the public — caused his approval rating to dip to record lows.)

For years, Christie remained an ally of Trump, even helping the former president prepare for debates in his 2020 reelection campaign. After the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Christie, who was already rumored to be considering a presidential run, began distancing himself from Trump. In recent speeches, he has urged Republicans to abandon “all these conspiracy theories and truth denying that I think are corrosive to the party and the country.”

“I worked as hard as I could to make Donald Trump the best candidate, and then ultimately the best president, that he could be,” Christie said in a “Washington Post Live” interview in 2021. “I don’t know what my options are going to be in 2024. And so I can’t sit here and compare Donald Trump to anyone else. And I also don’t know what will Donald Trump be talking about in 2023 and 2024. Maybe he’ll abandon the conversations he’s talking about, about the 2020 election, and move on to talking about ideas for the future.”

Hannah Knowles and Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.