Why Christie’s Gall Is Worse than Haley’s Gaffe

N o doubt, Nikki Haley’s brain freeze in failing to mention slavery when asked what caused the Civil War harms her quest to be the Republican presidential nominee. But what an overhyped story! After all, the odds that she could win the nomination even without such gaffes are very long, to put it mildly. Plus, President Biden and Vice President Harris say asinine things virtually every time they speak publicly; even factoring in anti-GOP media bias, the public sighs at this stuff — at least that sliver of the public that pays it any mind (which is an even smaller sliver this time of year).

In 2015, as governor of the first state to secede from the Union after Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election, Haley removed the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s state capitol after a mass-murder attack at a black Methodist church in Charleston. Patently, she is neither a racist nor ignorant about the Civil War.

That said, while Haley is clearly smart, competent, and hardworking, she’s not what most of us would describe as a generational political talent — and even the relative handful of those screw up royally from time to time. I’m not as down on her as Jeff Blehar is, but I’m exactly where he and Dan McLaughlin are in doubting whether she’s been tested enough. (Donald Trump and his travails have kept other candidates out of the spotlight, except to the extent that he has obsessively savaged Ron DeSantis — which has helped Haley’s modest rise as much or more than her debate performances.) She is an okay public speaker but not great off the cuff. Even in her otherwise solid debate showings, she’s been at her weakest when called on to defend some dubious statements she’s made, well, off the cuff. Combine all of that with how tired she must be: These candidates do long days and lots of travel with few breaks from talk-talk-talking, and any of us would make mistakes. The best interpretation of her flub is just that: It was a flub.

On the other hand, Chris Christie’s self-serving assessment of Haley’s flub — his tortured claim that it somehow went to her reluctance to tell the truth about Donald Trump, which only Christie is willing to do — was abysmal.

Predictably, Haley is already overcorrecting. Late last week, revisiting what she’d said, she maintained that “of course” the Civil War was about slavery, but that that was the “easy part of it.” Translation: I omitted a mention of slavery in the first go-round because everybody already knows about its role in the conflict; as a deep thinker, you see, I decided to delve into micro-causes. Eye roll–inducing on its face, this bit of revisionism is even worse when we consider how vapid her first answer had been: The war’s cause, she’d said, was “basically how government was gonna run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

For what little my take is worth, I think Haley would recover more points by conceding: “You know, I was exhausted and for a second there I drifted into stump speech mode rather than focusing on the question. I wish I had given a more thoughtful answer, but it happens to everyone.”

Is this going to step on whatever momentum Haley had? I guess . . . although my sense is that the Big-Mo stories about her have been more hope, hype, and Koch money than a real thing. (See, e.g., Jim Geraghty’s sharp assessment in the magazine; see also this recent polling: Trump +34 in Iowa, Trump +30 in New Hampshire, Trump +41 nationally in nomination contest — with Haley distantly behind everywhere).

I take no joy in saying that. Haley would beat Biden, and she’d be a fine president. That said, with time running out, I’d like to think her blunder would result in Republican primary voters giving DeSantis a second look. To be realistic, though, he’s languishing right about where Haley is in the polls — except, he’s gotten there by tumbling, rather than rallying a bit. So, if Haley’s blunder matters at all, it is probably just to further enhance Trump’s aura of inevitability. A GOP alternative is urgently needed, but there is no real sign of his or her emergence. Democrats have to be thrilled.

While I don’t question his raw talent, I am not as much a Christie fan as some of my colleagues. I’m thus gobsmacked by Chris Courage’s gall in seizing on Haley’s misstep to peddle his “Only I fearlessly tell the truth” schtick. According to him, Haley said what she said “because she’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth[.]” It’s the same reason, he elaborated, why “she’s unwilling to tell the truth about Donald Trump. She says he was the right president for the right time.” [emphasis added]

This is moronic. Haley stumbled in New Hampshire, for God’s sake. No one there would have been offended if she had said slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War. Indeed, such an assertion would have drawn more yawns than offense in South Carolina, or any of the other states that joined the Confederacy over 160 years ago. No intelligent person — which, Christie concedes, Haley is — fears that normal people would take offense from her uttering something that is both incessantly discussed and self-evidently true. That is why Christie and, in the aftermath, Haley have both said that slavery was the “easy” answer to the question posed.

But beyond that, when it mattered in 2020, Christie patently believed that Trump was the right president for the right time. Flush up to Election Day, Christie was helping Trump prepare for the debates against Biden. He not only thought Trump was the right president for the right time; he didn’t want that time to end — he was trying really hard to get Trump another four years in office.

I don’t blame him for that. I, too, supported Trump in 2020, albeit reluctantly. I even wrote for the magazine that, while Trump skeptics were justified in their doubts, they should still hold their noses and vote for him. A presidential administration, I contended, is about more than the president — in Trump’s case, much more since governing is not his thing. Ergo, a second Trump administration — which would very likely have included Christie, along with other solid Republicans and/or conservatives like the ones who’d steered the administration (Pompeo, Barr, McMaster, Mnuchin, DeVos, Haley, et al.) — would advance important national interests. To the contrary, it was certain that a Biden administration would be a train wreck. A Trump vote thus made sense, as Trump and Biden were the only meaningful choices on offer. (Staying home or writing in “Ronald Reagan” is more of an opt-out than an affirmative choice — though 2020 beat out of me the haughtiness with which I used to dismiss it.)

I was hardly alone in this view of the race. But here’s the thing: Just about everybody who took that position did not pretend, as Christie now does, that Trump somehow changed after the 2020 election — that the two-month “stop the steal” crusade leading up to the Capitol riot was epiphanic.

Christie was a close Trump adviser. He knows Trump well (as he likes to remind everyone — no matter how weird that is given his current posturing). The events leading up to the Capitol riot, and its aftermath, were appalling, but they were not surprising. No longtime Trump observer, even a casual one (rather than an insider like Christie), could honestly say: “Never saw that coming. Who would have believed that the Donald Trump we’ve known for all these decades would refuse to admit Biden beat him, insist the election was stolen, recklessly induce a protest that foreseeably got out of hand, and then stubbornly decline to use his influence to encourage the mob to leave the Capitol and go home? Shocker.”

Most of us who supported Trump in 2020 abhorred what happened after the election. None of us can truthfully say it was inconceivable that it could have happened.

Christie would not have put such effort into trying to get Trump reelected unless he believed, to borrow Haley’s phrase, that Trump was the right president for the right time. If Christie had had his way in November 2020, Trump would be still president this very day. But let’s not kid ourselves: The Donald Trump of November 2020 through January 6, 2021, was the exact same Donald Trump as the one who was president from January 2017 through October 2020. In fact, he was the exact same Donald Trump as the one Christie knew well, was friendly with, and supported politically for years prior to Trump’s 2016 election.

Trump is Trump. Those of us who supported him in 2020 knew exactly what we were supporting. We took a calculated risk: Judging by Trump’s first term, if he were reelected, he would recruit good advisers who would promote the economy, national security, and the rule of law while saving Trump and the country from his destructive tendencies. Nevertheless, we knew those tendencies well. We decided, eyes wide open, that a precarious wager on Trump was better than the certain disaster that would be a Biden administration led by the woke progressives who call the Democratic Party tune in this era. It was an excruciating choice. But it was not a mysterious choice — it was a picking of one’s poison. For better or worse, we’re all accountable for what we picked.

For Christie to pretend that it is Trump, rather than he, who changed is ridiculous. It’s also more than a little pathetic: Christie is a very smart guy who would be calling BS if he weren’t the one spouting it.

He is also savvy enough to know that he has no chance to win the nomination. Maybe no Trump competitor does, but Christie undoubtedly doesn’t. He’s been running for what seems like forever, and he’s at 3.3 percent among primary voters nationally. He’s run a tireless one-state campaign — New Hampshire — and he’s at a whopping 6 percent there. He’s closer than Haley is to being a generational political talent, but he missed his moment — 2012 — and it’s not coming back. In 2016, once that unhappy realization sank in, his performance as New Jersey governor so sagged in ennui and scandal that, after eight years, he left office with a nearly inconceivable 81 percent disapproval rating.

Christie is a serious, substantive guy. He could be a valuable public official in some unelected capacity — if he’s in some presidential administration, he will be a force, not window dressing. He’s just 61 (at nearly 65, I get to say “just”), so there’s still time for his career to rebound — but doing what he’s doing now will not help. His current presidential candidacy is a vanity project, not a realistic bid. Hence, his continued participation in the primary race necessarily abets — however marginally — the joint Trump-Democratic Party project to ensure that no GOP candidate who could win in November gains traction.

If Christie really believes what he’s now saying about Trump’s unfitness, why does he knowingly help Trump by staying in the race and bashing the only possible alternatives?