Endorsements usually don’t matter much, but Chris Christie giving his nod to Donald Trump shocked the political world and will bolster a Trump campaign that has grown from a madcap insurgency to a serious threat for the Republican nomination.
Most immediately, the New Jersey governor’s endorsement instantly changed the subject from Trump’s debate performance Thursday night, when Marco Rubio got the best of him.
Christie accentuates the Trump brand of bully-boy toughness. He further validates The Donald and paves the way for future endorsements.
Finally, he will be an eager and willing surrogate — who will relish nothing more than filleting Rubio, for whom he has a burning contempt.
Part of the punch of the Christie endorsement was its surprise, but really, where else did he have to go?
By any reasonable standard, Christie’s own presidential campaign was a desperate failure, fizzling out in New Hampshire after he practically took up residence in the state.
He had two choices: sitting in Trenton and going gentle into that electoral good night, or joining up with Trump and riding on the mogul’s private jet every other day, enjoying a luxury seat at the center of the political world. (Plus, though Christie denies he wants it, a potential veep slot or Cabinet post.)
The Christie-Trump pairing shows how, counter to the mogul’s reputation, he isn’t an outrageous right-winger. Absent his serial violations of political decorum and his advocacy of mass deportation, it would be clearer that Trump is a Northeastern moderate who will likely run as a tell-it-like-it-is pragmatist should he win the nomination.
And he’s potentially just a couple of weeks away from locking in that nomination.
Trump is headed toward a big Super Tuesday next week, when he’ll get more momentum and perhaps a couple more Christie-like endorsements. The Republican establishment may be panicking over his continued strength, but one form of panic is confusion and submission.
After Tuesday, the question will be whether Trump can be pulled back from the cusp of the nomination by someone else winning big, winner-take-all states like Florida, Ohio and Illinois on March 15. That is the last line of defense for opponents of Trump, and it will get over-run, too, unless The Donald is taken down a notch.
Can it be done? Rubio, with an assist from Ted Cruz, got the ball rolling by winning Thursday night’s debate. He played by Trump rules — interrupting and mocking at every opportunity. For the first time at one of these forums, Trump seemed occasionally overmatched.
Rubio kept at it the day after the debate at his rallies with long, schoolyard comedic riffs at Trump’s expense. This isn’t an edifying way to campaign. In fact, bodily fluids figure prominently, with Trump and Rubio trading barbs about who is sweating (or peeing) from nerves. But this is the only possible way to respond to Trump, who has a reptilian instinct for establishing dominance over his rivals.
Thursday night also opened up a new substantive line of attack against Trump, which is that he has hired illegal immigrants and conned the little guy, despite his posture as the protector of the American worker.
Aimed directly at Trump’s populist appeal, this tack may bear more fruit than prior complaints that he isn’t serious or conservative enough.
But Trump will fight back like a hellcat — and he now has a prominent wingman who shares his taste for no-holds-barred political combat.