Man Of The "Not THAT Crazy" People

Chris Christie's 2021 book is an intra-bubble parry--and also a reminder that Donald Trump very nearly killed him.

Donald Trump very nearly killed Chris Christie, a fact that, to my way of thinking, doesn’t get brought up nearly enough in their current Presidential campaign rivalry. Which is to say: it comes up almost never, whereas I think it should be talked about all the time.

It does, most assuredly, get a full discussion in Christie’s most recent book: Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden, which I just tore through in my quest to read campaign books of this cycle’s Presidential candidates.

More on the close call with death later. First, a chance to test your knowledge of right wing news cycles. Knowing that this book was published in November 2021, what issue does Christie name as the single most important one facing Republicans, the country, and the survival of democracy? I’ll reveal the answer below.

Republican Rescue reads very much like a Presidential campaign book. The first of its three sections, accounting for nearly half the content, is a memoir catching us up since his previous book, 2019’s Let Me Finish. The third section is prescriptions for Republican policies on a range of issues. That’s a classic campaign book formula.

Tucked in between is a half-hearted attempt to address the ostensible topic of the book: those truth deniers and conspiracy theorists pulling his precious party off-course.

In the ridiculously low bar of the current GOP, Christie gets to present himself as a bold teller of truths for dismissing birtherism (including the prominent role of the man who very nearly killed him), PizzaGate, QAnon, and The Big Lie of 2020 election denialism.  

Sadly, we must commend Christie for acknowledging, while seeking the Republican Presidential nomination, that two plus two equals four.

But what’s really happening here is a perfect functioning of the right-wing marketplace, as I have observed it for lo these many frustrating years. The marketplace allows its consumers to find their own comfort level of untruth, distortion, grievance, and conspiracy—while justifying themselves with the knowledge that “I’m not crazy like those people” one click further down the rabbit hole.

For Christie, Alex Jones of InfoWars, Q-adjacent Marjorie Taylor Greene, and election conspiracy peddler Sidney Powell are those people. Whereas he—as he tells us, repeatedly, boastfully—speaks only the truth and views things with clear eyes.

In the policy section, however, we find that Christie’s truths mostly come from a different section of the right-wing bubble. The chapter “On Education” insists that teachers unions, under thrall of critical race theory, literally want to teach that “we haven’t made any progress on racial matters in this country from the time of our founding to today”; that “Americans are now more racist than ever”; and that “white power and privilege are at an all-time high.” Christie proceeds to rebut these straw men at some length: do these union thugs know nothing about the Emancipation Proclamation? Come on!

Turning to “On Crime,” Christie similarly tells us that, during the Black Lives Matter protests, “Too many political leaders on the Democrat side of the aisle began to say: “The rioters deserve to burn things down. They are justified in looting stores and homes.” “

Granted, these are less crazy fibs than accusing those Democrats of running an international pedophile trafficking scheme out of a pizza parlor basement. But if a mainstream GOP leader such as Christie is affirming that Democrats equate white Americans with slaveholders and call for burning and looting their homes, why wouldn’t some conservatives believe something a little worse; and others believe even worse; and others something worse still?

Christie is simply pandering to the grievances imagined or inflated by a somewhat more mainstream section of the right wing marketplace. Which brings us to the question I posed earlier. The most pressing issue? It’s those damn teachers unions embracing critical race theory. Christie calls this “the Republican Party’s most important fight today… It’s more important for the survival of our country than any other issue you can name… The very survival of our democracy is dependent on getting this right.”

Well, that was then; this crisis, upon which the whole of democracy hangs in peril, did not come up in Christie’s two-hour townhall announcing his candidacy this month. Nor has he mentioned it at all during his campaign thus far as best I can tell.

Presumably, had he written this book a few months later, the Most Important Issue Of Our Lifetime would have been the terrifying Open Border—which gets no mention here; a few months after that, Record Inflation; and today, Biological Men Ruining Women’s Sports.

Actual issues, such as the economy, health care, and climate change, are not among the issues Christie wants to rescue the Republican Party with. A chapter “On Business” is entirely about the scourge of “corporate cancel culture.” The “On Media” chapter is about rescinding Section 230 to stop those known leftists of Silicon Valley from censoring Republicans. (Christie wonderfully asserts that “everything was fine” on social media until the companies “began deciding what could and couldn’t be posted on their sites.” Aside from the “fine” barrage of virulent misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism, it’s quite a gauzy take in a book ostensibly bemoaning disinformation and conspiracy theories.)

But enough of all that. Let’s talk about Christie being very nearly killed by Donald Trump.

Christie is quite certain that Trump, through depraved indifference and reckless irresponsibility, gave him COVID, putting him into the Intensive Care Unit for a week, terrified, contemplating the possibility of never speaking to his children again. Christie, a self-described overweight asthmatic, says he was vigilant in protecting himself against the virus. He broke his distancing only for Trump debate prep in the White House, which seemed safe since everybody there was always tested—except, it turns out, for the President, who eschewed precautions, declined testing (or perhaps ignored the results), and proceeded to infect all but one member of the debate team before heading to Walter Reed.

Christie comes across as rather bent out of shape about this. Also, he seems irked to have received only one call from Trump during his week in the ICU—an attempt to enquire whether Christie was planning to say that he got it from Trump.

I leave it to Presidential election historians to say whether this is the first nomination fight pitting a candidate against someone who very nearly killed him. I just think it’s a great story line, and we should be talking about it a lot more than we do.