The then President-elect Donald J. Trump tapped former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to head his transition team. Echoing Trump’s campaign promise, Christie pledged to hire the “best of the best” to staff Trump’s cabinet and senior members of his administration.
Then all of a sudden Jared Kushner prevailed upon Trump to fire him. And Christie’s binders full of A-list candidates ended up “in the trash.”
According to reliable reports, this firing was Kushner’s way of serving revenge cold for Christie prosecuting his daddy in the early 2000s. Back then, Christie was a headline-seeking US attorney. And he undoubtedly saw that prosecuting Jared’s daddy would generate very favorable headlines, which in turn would help his climb up the political ladder (into the New Jersey governor’s mansion).
After Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 counts of tax evasion, one count of retaliating against a federal witness – his brother-in-law [more on that below] – and another count of lying to the Federal Election Commission, Christie put out a statement calling the deal a ‘great victory for the people of New Jersey.’
Months later, Christie went a step further, expressing his pleasure in triumphant terms when Kushner was sentenced to two years in prison.
(CNN, November 17, 2016)
Given this background, one would expect Christie to retaliate, serving his own revenge cold for that firing. And foremost, one would expect him to make a correlation between his firing and Trump ending up with a cabinet of incompetent misfits.
What one would not expect, however, is that he would target every incompetent except the most obvious of them all, namely Trump himself.
Yet, according to reports on his forthcoming book, Let Me Finish, that’s precisely what Christie has done.
Christie tore strips off the ‘riffraff’ he said Trump saddled himself with. …
They are ‘amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons’ who ‘were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia,’ he added.
(CNN, January 22. 2019)
Except that it says far more about Trump that he saddled himself with riffraff than it says about them.
This is why there’s nothing heroic or even newsworthy about Christie taking these potshots. Frankly, Trump is the biggest “amateur, grifter, weakling … and unconvicted felon” in his administration.
In words he can relate to, he’s the biggest loser. Which makes Christie sparing him the brunt of his potshots tantamount to ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room.
The question is why? Especially given that it appears Trump did nothing more than hire the same kinds of riffraff to run our government that he hired to run his hotels and casinos into bankruptcy … six times. Forget potshots, this warranted a barrage of full-throated condemnation and derision.
Yet reports are that Christie chose instead to damn Trump with faint praise – no doubt expecting this narcissistic ignoramus to welcome the praise no matter how faint. Of course, the reason for Christie’s cowering is that, like every other Republican with anything to lose, he fears the wrath of Trump.
Christie knows that our tribal politics is such that only Republicans will be interested in buying his book. More to the point, he knows Trump has them all so spellbound that one negative tweet about his book would doom sales.
Never before in the history of politics have so many sacrificed so much for so little. And I cannot overstate the shock of so many evangelical Christians sacrificing their souls at the altar of this two-legged golden calf.
(“Everything Trump Praises Fails. Airline Safety Just the Latest Thing,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 21, 2018)
Incidentally, the title to Christie’s book unwittingly betrays his hapless cowardice. Because it suggests a man being ignored as he’s trying to say or do something important (like head the transition team for a new administration). Of course, given that Trump was the person ignoring him, perhaps the title should have been, Let Me Finish Please.
Even worse, his title is actually a rip-off from a children’s book. Let Me Finish (2016) by Minh Lê is about a boy who keeps trying to read thrilling books only to have exotic animals interrupt each time with spoilers from their favorite parts. It’s an indication of how much Christie has infantilized himself for Trump that the title he plagiarized was aimed at 5-year-olds.
In any event, this book will ensure Christie’s climb up the trash heap of history. There he will rot in infamy along with other notable Republicans like former Speaker Paul Ryan and current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. For this will surely be the fate of putative leaders who willfully sacrificed their principles and swallowed their pride to further the venal, racist, and regressive agenda of President Donald J. Trump.
Meanwhile, we’ve already been treated to more objective accounts of Trump’s kakistocratic administration in many books, including Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, and Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk.
Hell, we’ve already been treated even to more gossipy accounts like Christie’s in many books, including Cliff Sims’s Team of Vipers, Katy Tur’s Unbelievable, and Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.
Related commentaries:
Tribalism in American politics…
Everything Trump praises…
Fear…
Fire and fury…
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