(NewsNation) — Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie is putting an emphasis on the national debt and drug epidemic, telling NewsNation those would be two of his top priorities if he ascends to the White House.

More than a year out from the 2024 election, Christie is vying for the GOP nomination in a crowded field that is currently led by former President Donald Trump.

“We’ve got to deal with the budget because all of this overspending that we’ve done over time has caused the inflation that has ravaged this country over the last number of years and is bankrupting our kids and our grandkids,” Christie said Thursday on “CUOMO.” “We’ve got to sit down and talk about the budget, areas where we can cut spending back.”

The former New Jersey governor just met the donor threshold to qualify for the first primary debate in August. The Republican National Committee is requiring candidates to have 40,000 unique donors, as well as pledge to support the eventual nominee.

Aside from lowering the national deficit, Christie said he would deploy National Guard troops to the southern U.S. border to combat drug trafficking.

“What I want to do is to begin to aggressively interdict that fentanyl at the border and at the same time direct the secretary of Health and Human Services to come up with a program to greatly expand treatment availability for those who have the disease of drug addiction in our country so that people can start being treated and start getting that second chance in their life,” Christie said.

He has been a frequent and vocal critic of Trump. Most recently, those criticisms elicited boos at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual conference in Washington, D.C.

Christie warned attendees to “beware of a leader who says that when something goes wrong, it’s everybody else’s fault” but “when things go right, everything is to his credit.”

Christie, who also ran in 2016, is positioning himself as a conservative blue state governor with a track record of dealing with “big issues,” just as Ronald Reagan did with Social Security and immigration.

“Those are the kind of issues that I want to deal with, and only a blue state governor who’s conservative has the experience to be able to do that,” Christie said. “Reagan did it, and that’s exactly the course I’m gonna follow.”

As proof of his conservative bona fides, Christie touted balancing the state budget, not raising taxes and expanding school choice programs.

While Christie enjoyed high approval ratings early in his tenure, when he left office in 2018, his approval rating was around 20%.

On drug trafficking, he vowed take a hard-line stance with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said earlier this year that Mexico wasn’t responsible for the fentanyl epidemic in America.

Several Republicans have called on the Biden administration to declare the drug cartels terrorists and use military force to break up their operations.

“I’ll give him a chance to fix it himself while we have the National Guard at the border, but if I see no improvement in what Mexico is doing with the cartels, then I will have a plan with our intelligence community and our Pentagon to be able to do what the Mexicans are unwilling to do,” Christie said. “I don’t want to fight with Mexico, I want to have a great relationship … and I’ll work hard to do that, but I will not do it at the cost of 110,000 American lives a year.”

NewsNation digital producer Katie Smith contributed to this report.