Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has appeared on The Late Show in the US

telling host Stephen Colbert that he would be a better president than Donald Trump.

“Would you have been a better president than Trump?” Colbert asked Mr Christie.

“Yes,” Christie said, without hesitation and to audience applause.

Colbert responded with, “I like that, that’s nice.”

According to Fox News, the pair continued the conversation about Mr Christie’s current constituency where Colbert, citing Christie’s 15 per cent approval rating in New Jersey, asked, “Who likes you?”

Mr Christie was on the show to promote his new book, Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics.

Colbert had a go at the former politician on his support for Mr Trump, saying, “he’ll throw anybody under the bus”.

“You think I don’t know?” Mr Christie said as the audience cracked up. “I got fired from the transition.”

Mr Christie also spent the interview downing George Clooney’s “liberal” tequila brand Casamigos.

“I’ll tell you something, if it gets me loaded, I don’t care. Liberal, conservative, who cares?” Christie asked.

Mr Christie also revealed how he had discussed the recent US government shutdown with Mr Trump saying the US president “blew it”.

“I said this to him, like, listen, if you’re going to do this, you better have an exit plan because sometimes in politics, things don’t go the way you expect. And so if it doesn’t go well in the first couple of days, you gotta have a way to get it back open,” Mr Christie said.

“I just said to him, ‘It’s okay. It’s a power you have and if you want to do it but you have to have a plan so you accomplish something by it and then reopen it.’ And I don’t think, given that it went 35 days, we had a plan.”

Still, Mr Christie told Colbert he had no regrets about backing the former TV star to run for president.

“I made a decision at the time that he was going to win the nomination after I dropped out, and that I preferred him to Hillary Clinton,” Mr Christie said.

“And that’s why I made the decision. It wasn’t a whole lot more complicated than that. And I still agree with what his policies are, more than I agree with Hillary Clinton’s.”