The Case For Christie: In the GOP Mob War, You Need A Prosecutor
Governor Chris Christie won't win the American presidency but he deserves a place in the conversation
Chris Christie first met Joe Biden forty years ago. “I met him when I was sophomore at the University of Delaware,” Christie said to Ian Bremmer of GZero.
The country will be much better off if the choice in 2024 is between two notable University of Delaware Blue Hens. Suck on that, Harvard.
I think often of this clip between Trevor Noah and Chris Christie and the friendship that they have. It is the sort of conversation which might have brought the country together in a different time.
I didn’t really understand the role of Christie in the GOP primary until some time had passed. Christie is a federal prosecutor who was mentored by Tom Kean — the deep state Republican governor of New Jersey.
Here’s where I was in 2016, watching and sometimes making history.
When I had last seen [Johnson] in person, it was at Trump’s election night victory party sometime after 3 a.m., and he was standing about 10 yards from the president-elect. “Chris Christie will not be as powerful as he now appears,” Johnson informed me. Two days later, Christie was demoted from chairman to vice-chairman of the transition, and he has drifted further from the center of Trump’s orbit since then.
“It’s no secret that I’m friendly with people who are now in the government,” Johnson said back in Midtown three weeks later, on the second floor of the swanky Lambs Club.
Alas, the Israelis quickly targeted me and lied about me to Ryan Mac then of Forbes Magazine. I lost my insider track and that was that.
I correctly predicted — or was I told? — that Kushner would finish Christie. Christie may yet have the last laugh now as he readies a campaign for the presidency in 2024. Yes, we may well need a prosecutor to clean up the muck of the GOP. Call it a Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden.
I think Donald Trump’s presidency ended before it began because Donald Trump couldn’t tell anyone “no” — least of all his family and the weird foreigners in his midst who had hung around from his reality TV and real estate days. Trump wanted to be popular rather than populist. And indeed he remains rather popular among the GOP’s redneck base.
Trump didn’t, in the final analysis, want to lead. He wanted to yell at the TV and to talk to reporters and to eat McDonald’s and do all those things you do when you don’t want to do what you have to do. Even now while on a presidential campaign, he still finds time to golf nearly every day.
In a just country, Donald Trump wouldn’t be likely to win the nomination again. But we don’t live in a just country, do we?
The next alternative to Trump — Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida — strikes me as little more than a trap for a lot of white collar criminals who want to revert to a pre-Joe Biden era. Lotsa luck in your senior year, fellas.
It’s easy to imagine a world in which a former federal prosecutor lawyerly cleans up the sorts of messes that bedevils the Republican Party in much the same way that the Republican-controlled Texas House dispatched the very corrupt Ken Paxton this past week. Republicans need to lead the effort in taking down their own.
Now Christie was passed over for the vice presidency because Jared believed that having Pence on the ticket would get the Koch money. Jared was never right about anything really. Kushner, being a crook and a crook’s son, didn’t like having a federal prosecutor around. Like father, like son? Let’s hope.
When Christie was forced off the stage chaos ensued. There were no more adults in the room, and the inmates soon grabbed control of the asylum that was the Trump administration. It was a wild and dangerous time.
Christie is right. Elections are about the hope for the future and not the resentments of the past. It’ll be four years since 2020 — a year most of which would do anything not to relive.
If I were to advise Christie, here is what my campaign would focus on:
Run against corruption. Jared Kushner manipulated his influence within our government and shook down our allies to enrich himself and his friends. This is a fact.
Run against nepotism. Every failure of the Trump presidency can be laid at Jared Kushner’s feet. He wanted the big boy job and he got it but now he’s going to get the big boy accountability.
Run on climate change. Even if you’re a skeptic of the science, it makes more sense for our country to have cleaner, more reliable, more renewable sources of energy. It makes us independent and less reliant on other countries that do not have our best interest at heart. The world is warming. Who better than a man who swallowed his pride to serve his constituents and get money for Hurricane Sandy rebuild?
The story gets a little weirder when you consider that one of Christie’s likely supporters is Steve Cohen, the billionaire hedge fund owner of the New York Mets.
The brother-in-law of this arch-criminal that Trump (really Jared) pardoned was none other than Milton Balkany, the guy who tried to extort Steve Cohen for money and went to jail.
Think about it:
Cohen is backing Christie who jailed Jared’s father Charles who Trump (really Jared) also pardoned.
Only a prosecutor would be able to clean up this mess, or at least begin the cleanup process. Christie is the right man for that job.