To be fair, none of Christie’s new semi-fans is under any illusions about that. Each paean is loaded down with backhanded compliments and acknowledgments that Christie is going nowhere. Michelle Goldberg of, yes, The New York Times nails the underlying problem: “My enjoyment of his newfound Resistance shtick doesn’t bode well for Christie. The people he needs to win over are not liberal New York Times columnists, but voters who hate liberal New York Times columnists.”
Yet even with the self-awareness, many of these rosy impressions of Christie stem from a questionable vision of how to beat Trump. Christie’s appeal relates to an Aaron Sorkin–style theory of politics, in which the way to defeat Trump is to get onstage with him in a debate and say just the right thing—that with a verbal slap that is clever and cutting enough, Trump will deflate. Soaring music rises, the credits roll, and everyone returns happy to a pre-2016 world. Christie seems to subscribe to this theory himself, telling anyone who will listen—reporters, mostly—that he is the only person who can beat Trump. “It takes a brawler to fight a brawler,” Polman writes.
As it happens, only one person has beaten Trump in an election, and that isn’t how he did it.
[I enjoy Sorkin’s work — mostly — but it’s mainly political fantasy. That also describes the Chris Christie media fantasy (and that of Christie himself), and it ignores the fact that Christie failed at it in 2015/16 and has largely been irrelevant ever since. on Graham’s other point, Biden didn’t beat Trump as much as Trump beat himself. He couldn’t moderate the chaos he created, and the pandemic made that much worse and turned him into a Democrat turnout machine. — Ed]
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