Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, appears as a regular commentator on the top-rated Sunday talk show – This Week.
The conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment.
Listen, I have been a supporter of the president’s. I voted for him twice. But elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen.
(HuffPost, November 22, 2020)
That is what he said on today’s episode about Donald Trump refusing – not just to concede the presidential election to Joe Biden, but to even allow any member of his administration to facilitate a smooth transition, which has been a hallmark of American democracy for over 200 years:
But Karen Finney, a fellow commentator on This Week, was right to “lecture” him on the hypocrisy inherent in him lecturing fellow Republicans about putting country over party.
After all, Christie stood by as Trump spent the past four years putting himself above party and country. This, while Trump was also doing his damndest to destroy the democratic institutions and foreign alliances that have been the envy of the world since the presidency of George Washington.
No doubt the conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment over the past three weeks. But that pales in comparison with the national embarrassment the conduct of the president’s political party has been over the past four years.
In fact, I’ve been preaching since 2016 that Republicans supporting Trump are like Israelites worshiping the Golden Calf. Because only that explains their cult-like devotion to this demagogue acting like a demigod.
We had good reason to fear that Russian-style mischief behind the scenes was the greatest threat to American democracy. Yet here are Republicans trying to pull off a Venezuelan-style coup in broad daylight. Of course, they’re now so programmed, they probably think a coup in the name of Trump is not undemocratic at all.
More to the point, though, Christie waxed indignant about other Republicans failing to urge Trump to do what neither has ever done, namely acknowledge generally accepted facts for the sake of the country (in this case, that he lost this election and Biden will be inaugurated on Jan. 20).
Yet, in the same breath, he admitted that he voted to give Trump another four years to completely destroy everything he claims to love about this country. I’m not sure which is worse: the contradiction or the stupidity inherent in that. Either way it’s irredeemably damning.
After all, what’s the point in objecting to Trump destroying more democratic norms on his way out of the presidency if you were prepared to give him another four years as president to do so completely, and perhaps irreparably? I mean, isn’t it clear that he already has America looking more like a banana republic than a beacon of democracy…?
This vindicates everything I wrote about him in “Chris Christie’s Book Shows He’s Just a Blowhard Coward,” January 24, 2019. Which is why Finney was too kind. Because, instead of lecturing Christie, she should have told him to get off TV and spend the rest of his days in monastic silence atoning for his political sins.
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the Republicans… Republican hypocrisy… worshiping Trump… Chris Christie…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Sunday, at 2:07 pm