New Jersey residents are taking the daily blasts of insanity from our president in better stride than most of America. Trump doesn’t shock us here in the Garden State.
Why? Because narcissistic, arrogant, not too bright, slimness-challenged bullies are nothing new to us. We’ve endured Chris Christie for eight interminable years.
Christie, who just this week shocked absolutely no one by ordering a shutdown of state services including public beaches then showed up with his family and friends to take advantage of a now-empty beach, has been spitting in his constituents faces since 2009.
A CNN article about this latest Christie bout of selfishness claimed it was evidence that Christie had stopped caring. No, news flash. He never cared.
Chris Christie and family at the beach
He rose to power exactly the same way Trump did: by saying screw you to an electorate that thought saying screw you to the electorate meant you were tough. And cool. And just what we needed.
And just like Trump, Christie cared only about himself and never about the people he was elected to serve.
Christie’s current approval rating is 15 percent, the lowest of any governor in the country, the lowest ever recorded for any New Jersey governor, and one of the lowest of any governor anywhere ever.
I pride myself on being one of those early who saw that emperor Christie had no clothes (a thought that still makes me shudder.)
He was always said to be great at connecting with regular folks, campaigning, at town halls, one on one. He was said to have that common touch.
Baloney. I had the opportunity to see him perform at six or seven town halls and he was always arrogant, always a bully. He may have confined his abuse to telling constituents to shut up unlike his role model Trump who frequently told people in the crowd to beat the crap out of others, but the message was the same. I’m governor and you’re not, and that means I can do anything I want.
Christie was never the retail politics genius an easily duped media believed, witness his dismal performance in the New Hampshire primary in 2016 where his style was predicted to resonate with savvy Granite State voters.
They were savvy. The gave him seven percent of the vote, a sixth place finish and no delegates, ending his absurd hope of becoming president, ceding that role to the even more finely honed arrogant, ignorant child who became president.
Christie brushes off his staggeringly low approval ratings by saying, “Poll numbers matter when you’re running for something. When you’re not running for something, they don’t matter a bit.”
And caps it off with, “And I don’t care.”
“And I don’t care” will be the legacy of the eight years Christie ran my home state. He was a joke and a jerk and anyone with eyes and active brain cells could have seen it were they not so enraptured by his screw you demeanor.
Except they didn’t. Christie beat incumbent Governor Jon Corzine in 2009 by a slight 3.5 percent (Corzine, former head of Goldman Sachs, had his own problems) and then won by 22 percent in 2013 over an unknown sacrificial lamb.
While New Jersey is famous in popular culture for the Sopranos and “Jersey Shore,” it is also the 9th or 10th “most educated” state in the country, so there’s no excuse for us putting this disgraceful excuse for a leader in the governor’s mansion - twice.
But we did. And although it was Christie who seduced the million-plus people who voted for him, those million-plus ultimately are responsible for him.
In 2013, when Christie won by a landslide, he was fresh off appearing with President Obama after Hurricane Sandy and saying – probably for the only time in his career – that the people of New Jersey mattered more than politics.
That catapulted him, briefly, into the role of darling of the Republican party, which dearly needed darlings, and found in this brash playground bully a new shiny object.
And who knows? If Trump hadn’t entered the race, Christie might have done well, might, maybe, possibly, even have won the nomination.
But in the battle of haters, America saw Christie and compared him with Donald Trump and figured, why have Crash Davis (the minor league baseball player in the movie “Bull Durham”) when you can have Derek Jeter?
So here in Jersey, we still marvel at the daily dose of crassness and selfishness meted out by Donald Trump, a man who just doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
But we aren’t fazed. We had Chris Christie for eight years. Taking his family to a beach he closed to the public doesn’t mean he stopped caring.
Spoiler alert about Chris Christie: He never cared.