By MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images.
Chris Christie’s tenure as governor of New Jersey was largely defined by his status as one of the most hated men in the Garden State. He gutted public-school funding and regularly brawled with constituents. He closed state beaches on Fourth of July weekend, only to be caught lounging on one without a care in the world. Then, of course, there was “Bridgegate,” an act of petty retribution the governor supposedly knew nothing about, despite the fact that it sounded exactly like something he would do. Unsurprisingly, Christie left office with a 14 percent approval rating. But there’s nothing like an exponentially worse politician to rehab one’s image by comparison, a dynamic the former governor has really leaned into over the past month!
Yukking it up at a party to celebrate the release of his memoir, Let Me Finish, at the 9,000-square-foot penthouse of hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen—which could be yours for the severely discounted price of $45 million—Christie reportedly regaled the crowd with his takes on the 2020 field. On Kamala Harris: “She’s articulate and she presents herself pretty well, O.K. So she’s got some advantages.” Cory Booker? “Everybody’s going to listen to that first speech and go, ‘I love him.’ Will they love him for the second speech, third speech, and fourth speech, and is there a second speech, third speech, and fourth speech?” Joe Biden? Apparently it comes down to if he comes off as “the adult in the room” or “crazy Uncle Joe . . . saying wacky stuff.” Amy Klobuchar? Christie, who dropped out of the Republican primary after winning just 7 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, thinks this business about her reportedly being awful to her staff will be tough to overcome. Christie, who claims he was kicked off the White House transition team by Jared Kushner, also made a point of enumerating all the jobs Donald Trump supposedly offered him: “Secretary of labor, twice. Secretary of homeland security, twice. Ambassador to Rome. Ambassador to the Vatican. And special assistant to the president.”
Cohen’s Midtown duplex was a fitting pit stop on Christie’s current rehabilitation tour, given their long, mutualistic relationship. When Cohen’s hedge fund S.A.C. Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to insider trading, Christie bucked Cohen up the very next day with an invite to his re-election party and a private dinner. (Cohen himself was never charged.) Later, in 2015, Cohen wrote sizable checks to a pro-Christie super-PAC back when the governor had his eye on the White House.
While the primary focus of the Christie media blitz is selling books and laundering his reputation, a secondary goal appears to be Christie’s all-consuming desire to take his revenge on the Kushners. “It’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted . . . and I was U.S. attorney in New Jersey,” Christie told PBS’s Margaret Hoover last month, explaining why he put Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, behind bars. In Let Me Finish, Christie claims that Jared got him fired from Trump’s transition as revenge for prosecuting his father over a decade earlier. Jared, it seems, argued that the then-U.S. attorney general should have minded his own business when it came to Charles’s decision to hire a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband—who was cooperating with the feds at the time—tape the encounter, and send the tape to his sister. According to Christie, Jared insisted such things were “family matter[s], matter[s] to be handled by the family or the rabbis,” an argument he has somehow made on more than one occasion!
Whether throwing Trump and Jared under the bus will be enough to refurbish Christie in the public eye remains to be seen. On the plus side, several of the president’s stooges and lackeys who have pulled back the curtain on the administration have come out looking positively rosy on the other side—and if anyone is well practiced at rebounding from abject humiliation, it’s Chris Christie.
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