NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I t is difficult to divine just who loathes Chris Christie the most: the Never Trumpers who laughed at his humiliating 2016 capitulation to Trump World or the MAGA crowd fuming at his attempt to pretend it never happened.
But here we have the rarest case in politics: Both sides are equally right.
That is why Christie’s path to the Republican presidential nomination is as tight as a Spider-Man suit freshly pulled out of the dryer.
Nevertheless, there was Christie in New Hampshire this week, relighting the fuse of a 2016 presidential campaign that saw him finish last in the Granite State’s primary. Shortly thereafter, he sold his soul and endorsed Trump — now, he insists he merely pawned his soul and wants to purchase it back, none the worse for wear.
Perhaps the Never Trumpers should welcome Christie back to the fold. If the party is once again going to be one that governs via legislative majorities and not deranged, self-aggrandizing tweets, the anti-Trump crowd is going to have to grant clemency to some people who lost their mind in the storm-tossed late 2010s.
But Christie suffered through a period of self-inflicted public torture so intense it was often difficult to ascertain whether Americans were witnessing a presidential campaign or a sadistic Japanese game show.
There was the Trump rally where the future president walked up to Christie and told him to “get on the plane and go home.” There was the rally where Trump held a giant umbrella over himself, letting Christie get soaked. And there was the press conference where Christie stood behind Trump, stone faced, as America watched a grown man’s essence leave his body. (This episode was forever memorialized in an SNL skit in which Christie, played by Bobby Moynihan, stands behind Trump, played by Darrell Hammond, who calls Christie a “sad, desperate, little potato.”)
It was as if the Mafia had kidnapped Christie’s dog and told him the only way he was going to see the pooch alive again was if he let Trump demean him in public.
It didn’t have to be this way. Christie was once a Republican star, having ascended to the governorship of a blue state by talking tough and backing it up legislatively. Before the advent of Pornhub, conservatives could get their thrills online by watching grainy videos of Christie lumbering off a stage to yell at a teachers’ union representative or law student. He was the GOP Matt Foley, barking at lefties to shape up or face living in a van down by the river.
Had Christie struck when his name still conducted heat, he may have been the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. After losing the presidency to Barack Obama in 2008, the party wanted someone willing to fight. In a sense, Christie was Trump before the party knew it wanted (or could have) Trump.
Once 2012 passed, so did any chance the New Jersey governor had of ever being president. He was beset by scandals, from Bridgegate, when members of his administration shut down the George Washington Bridge to punish Fort Lee’s mayor for not supporting him, to spending the day at a public beach with his family even though the beach had been closed to the public.
Consequently, the 2016 presidential run felt a lot like a damaged politician trying to restore his name, which is why his campaign held the public’s interest for about as long as a Frankie Goes to Hollywood greatest hits album.
But Christie did not flunk out of the 2016 race without making a mark. There is a popular fiction among some traditional conservatives that Christie’s evisceration of Marco Rubio on a New Hampshire debate stage actually handed the nomination to Trump. When the Florida senator, the darling of the Never-Ever Trumpers, short-circuited, repeating a line he’d already used about Barack Obama knowing “exactly what he is doing,” Christie, exhuming his past as a verbal pugilist, pummeled Rubio, who slouched to a fifth-place finish on primary day.
The only candidate Rubio beat? Chris Christie.
It’s silly to think, however, that Christie’s shenanigans cast the primary to Trump, or that he could have knocked Trump down a peg had he trained his ire on the man he now claims he loathes. Trump won New Hampshire with 35 percent of the vote — nearly 20 percent more than the second-place finisher, John Kasich. Another candidate could have walked on the debate stage and turned bread into fish and they weren’t beating Trump. By February 2016, the party had made up its mind what it wanted, and it was something the likes of which American politics had never seen.
Further, there is no evidence that lobbing insults at Trump would ever do any good. As he grew more desperate, Rubio began a Trump-like insult-comic routine, mocking the front-runner for his misspelled tweets. (“Just like Trump Tower, he must have hired a foreign worker to do his tweets,” Rubio joked.)
Little Marco was out of the race three weeks later.
(Oh, and remember the week that Ted Cruz pretended to be mad at Trump for suggesting his wife was ugly and accusing his father of taking part in the John F. Kennedy assassination? Good times.)
In the end, Christie turned out to be a historical echo in 2016. But as Oscar Wilde once noted, “a burnt child loves the fire,” so Christie is back, evidently prepared once again to scale Wikipedia Footnote Mountain.
Christie has claimed that he alone has the interlocutory skills to tussle with Trump. “You better have somebody on that stage who can do to him what I did to Marco because that’s the only thing that’s going to defeat Donald Trump,” he said recently. “And that means you’ve got to have the skill to do it. And that means you have to be fearless because he will come right back at you.”
This is why there are those who actually believe Christie can serve a useful purpose in the 2024 primary. Writing at the Dispatch, Nick Catoggio makes the case that a Christie pummeling could take both Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis down a notch, opening the race for someone who didn’t in 2016 contract amnesia about what conservatism stands for. DeSantis has said America shouldn’t get in a “proxy war” and downplayed Russian aggression in Ukraine. Christie snapped that someone should “please place a wake-up call to Tallahassee.”
“Do you want someone onstage with Trump this summer throwing rhetorical roundhouses at him?” writes Catoggio. “Well, unless and until Liz Cheney decides to reenter politics, Chris Christie is probably the only game in town.”
But there is no scenario under which Christie lays a cuticle on Trump whether on a debate stage, in a candidate forum, on Twitter or TikTok, on a talk show, or anywhere else. The political grim reaper shadows Christie wherever he roams, in the form of videos of the ample Jersey man waddling behind Trump like a duckling, defending Trump against impeachment charges and otherwise taking the former president’s abuse in an attempt to land a job in the Trump administration.
Every time Christie makes the case that Trump is unfit, he will be reminded of the fact that he chose the scent of Trump’s cologne over the security of our nation.
Time and time again, Christie flirted with the possibility of turning against Trump, and yet he never did — not when it mattered. He claims he realized Trump was a menace after he tried to steal the 2020 election, acknowledging he made a “strategic error” in supporting Trump because he “didn’t want Hillary Clinton to be president.”
“None of us knew what kind of president he really would be or not,” Christie told a questioner at a New Hampshire event this week.
“I did,” replied the questioner.
The past eight years have laid bare the fact that few politicians have principles beyond what is politically advantageous for themselves at the moment. But Chris Christie is the conductor of that orchestra of political nihilism. He simply represents the nullification of another 3 percent that could be used to beat Trump by a more viable candidate. Christie claims he would be the anti-Trumper in the race, but his entrance would simply make the former president’s nomination more likely.
Political candidates frequently say embarrassing things. But rarely is a candidate’s entire presence in a primary in and of itself such an embarrassment. Chris Christie says he’s giving himself until May to decide whether to run. The clock is ticking on his dignity.