“When people are feeling insecure,” Bill Clinton famously said, “they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.” Clinton wasn’t talking specifically about today’s Republican primary voters, but the lesson applies. Whether Donald Trump or someone else is the Republican nominee in 2024, his style—a toxic potpourri of machismo, populism, and nationalism—is here to stay.
If the nominee isn’t Trump, who could fill the role? Let me begin with the man who was ahead of the curve, staking out this territory before Trump came along: Chris Christie. Now, I know progressives are rolling their eyes heavenward. What about Bridgegate? What about how Christie humiliated himself by endorsing Trump? What about the meme of him lounging on a beach while state beaches were closed to the public? In a GOP primary, those things won’t hurt him, and some of them may help him.
Christie is publicly mulling a run; aside from being an authentic bully, here’s what we also know about Christie: He has mad political skills. He was elected governor of New Jersey. Twice. As a Republican. The second time, he won by a landslide. Later, during a crucial New Hampshire primary debate, he single-handedly destroyed the 2016 campaign of Marco Rubio: a man many of us saw as a once-in-a-generation candidate. Christie has sharp elbows, and he’s recently throwing them at Trump. Christie has been a critic of Trump’s election fraud claims since November.
A former federal prosecutor, Christie ousted incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine in 2009, promising to take on the public-employee unions. And he never stopped fighting. Take for example, the special education teacher named Melissa Tomlinson who confronted him in 2013. She provoked a debate and a finger-wagging rant from Christie that ended with the line, “I’m sick of you people.” Here’s the thing. Christie’s supporters LOVED it. “As the bus door closed, Tomlinson found herself surrounded by Christie partisans. An elderly woman turned to Tomlinson and told her, ‘You’re in the wrong place, hon,’” reported NorthJersey.com. “‘The crowd started heckling, and cheering for Christie,’ Tomlinson recalled. ‘I almost have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from it. I keep seeing people looming over my head.’”
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” said the great pugilist and philosopher, Mike Tyson. In Christie’s Jersey, lots of people got (rhetorically) punched in the mouth (he would later say that teachers unions deserve “a punch in the face.”) And, for a long time, it worked. Flawlessly!
In fact, it’s likely that Trump learned something from Christie, who, after all, was right next door. “Christie may have been the ‘pioneer, the guy Trump learned from,’ said Assemblyman John McKeon, D-Essex. He has been a frequent target of Christie’s wrath, dubbed a ‘hack lawyer’ during a recent dispute over the management of NJ Transit.” It may be no coincidence that Ann Coulter, who saw Trump’s rise in 2016, saw something in Christie back in 2011.
Christie ended up leaving office as a wildly unpopular…
Read More News: Chris Christie Wants to Out-Trump Trump
