The Scrapbook is time and again reminded that one of the occupational hazards of covering politics is schadenfreude. As unsympathetic as political creatures are, it’s always better for your soul to derive satisfaction from watching someone succeed than to take delight in their failure.
However, watching Chris Christie drop out of the presidential race and become Donald Trump’s most prominent surrogate has tempted us more than once into an unholy glee at his expense. Perhaps if Gov. Christie had not so energetically broken an earlier, explicit promise not to support Trump, we would try harder to cut him some slack.
Further, as much as Christie’s confrontational style could generate exciting political dialogue, he was always walking a rhetorical tightrope between tells-it-like-it-is and bullying. Now that Christie has thrown his, ahem, weight behind Trump, who is as dependent on insults as he is on oxygen, sympathy for Christie is harder to come by.
In observing Christie’s recent public appearances, it’s been impossible not to notice that while his mouth says “Trump for president!” every other part of his body is screaming that he’s made a huge mistake. At a campaign rally on February 27, a hot microphone caught Trump dismissing Christie and telling him to go home, even as it appeared Christie wanted to remain on stage. The next day Christie did an interview on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Normally, the famously pugilistic Christie never backs down, but when forced to defend Trump’s record, Christie spent nearly 10 cringe-inducing minutes awkwardly trying to change the subject.
Then on Super Tuesday, after introducing Trump, Christie stood awkwardly behind him on the dais through the entirety of Trump’s remarks and press conference, looking so shellshocked and dead-behind-the-eyes that multiple major news outlets wrote reports focused almost exclusively on his dejected facial expression. At the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri penned arguably the most immortal line of the 2016 campaign so far: “His were the eyes of a man who has gazed into the abyss, and the abyss gazed back, and then he endorsed the abyss.”
By the next day, the New York Times was asking, “What, you might ask, could be worse than a thoroughly failed presidential candidate returning home as a lame-duck governor to a $10 billion budget deficit and a recalcitrant legislature?” (Hint: It involves being a barnacle on the hull of the SS Trump.) And the New Hampshire Union Leader, which gave Christie its coveted primary endorsement, went so far as to retract it. “Boy, were we wrong,” wrote the paper’s publisher. “Rather than standing up to the bully, Christie bent his knee.” The Times further reported that Christie, who prides himself on his rough-and-tumble Jersey attitude, was “taken aback by the depth of the vitriol over the past few days.”
We won’t go so far as to say Christie deserves vitriolic attacks, but he should have expected them. We always thought Chris Christie was a better man than the one who just sold his credibility and principles for 30 very classy pieces of silver.
