The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  “I am embarrassed, and humiliated,” he told them, staring straight out into the sea of whirring cameras. And for the next two excruciating hours, he fielded their questions, apologizing over and over for his “failure.”

  While Christie denied any knowledge of his staff’s behavior, the scandal was immensely damaging to his reputation. It made him seem like a bully, instead of a no-nonsense tough guy. It undermined his straight-talk shtick, painting him as yet another shady, corrupt politician.

  The days that followed the press conference brought by far the most brutal media coverage of Christie’s career. The New York City tabloids were merrily screaming their headlines, overjoyed to have finally found a genuine scandal to match their default populist outrage.

  “PATHETIC,” sneered one.

  “IGNORANCE IS CHRIS,” shouted another.

  In one particularly on point front page, Christie was portrayed with a thought bubble containing a picture of the White House above his head. The headline: “FAT CHANCE NOW, CHRIS.”

  As the New York papers derided his “brazen cover-up” and “self-serving, self-pitying display of contrition,” the conservative media—which had long ago dubbed the New Jersey governor a traitor and an ideological squish—engaged in open schadenfreude, with Glenn Beck gleefully tweeting “#FatandFurious.” “There’s more here and it is going to be the problem that haunts Chris Christie,” predicted Red-State’s Erick Erickson. And beyond the right-wing pile-on, mainstream political pundits wondered whether Christie might be fatally damaged.

  The Republican establishment, meanwhile, was gripped by panic as it watched another favorite son fall from grace. Donors who had been lining up behind Christie were now scattering. “There are definitely people jumping ship,” one high-level fund-raiser told me at the time, adding that it had gotten so bad that some of the party’s moneymen were now looking back fondly on the good old days of 2012: “You know what a lot of them say to me? ‘I think we need Mitt back.’”

  Christie’s poll numbers slid, both in New Jersey and nationally: the percentage of Republicans who thought he would make a good president sank from 64 to 50 by the end of the month. Republican Ken Cuccinelli, the former candidate for Virginia governor, called on him to resign as chairman of the Republican Governors Association.

  Publicly, conservatives knocked the liberal media for giving more play to Bridgegate than Benghazi or the IRS targeting scandal. But privately, donors and kingmakers were quickly backing away from their former anointed one.

  Journalists and pundits from Chuck Todd to Bret Baier began citing anonymous donors who declared Christie’s 2016 ambitions “done.” Another anonymous strategist told National Review, “The idea that he’s the prohibitive front-runner is over.” Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who owned Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, predicted there would be “more stuff coming out” that would further damage Christie’s electoral chances. And Bill Kristol—who had quietly met Christie for pizza just a few months before to counsel him on foreign policy and discuss his 2016 prospects—exclaimed during a heated Crossfire appearance, “He’s not my superstar… He’s not the actual favorite among the Republican party. Mike Huckabee would beat Chris Christie right now for the Republican nomination.”

  Over the following year, Christie would be bogged down by multiple investigations and more allegations of corruption, including probes into whether he mishandled federal funds for Hurricane Sandy relief. More stories would emerge depicting him as a bully. In one, a Rutgers professor who crossed him on a redistricting commission found his program’s funding slashed; in another, a Republican state senator who voted against one of Christie’s pet projects discovered that plans for a judgeship in his county had mysteriously stalled. There were also stories about Christie’s penchant for lavish travel, studded with juicy details, like the $30,000 hotel in Israel to which his family flew in a private jet, or the taxpayer-funded plane tickets totaling $8,156 that enabled his family to attend the Super Bowl.

  None of these revelations resulted in indictments or corruption charges, but the conventional wisdom across the party was that Christie was now damaged goods. As the veteran Republican strategist Alex Castellanos put it, “The thing I think about Christie that’s hard is that his one trick, which used to be adorable and fun—that he would piss off the news media and speak truth to power—now often comes across as bullying and boorish.”

  This perception of Christie wasn’t limited to cable news chatter; it showed up in focus groups, too. A year after the Bridgegate scandal broke, veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz addressed a private gathering of top-level donors in California, and presented the latest results from his firm’s opinion research on the New Jersey governor. He had been showing footage of Christie’s speeches and interviews to groups of Republican voters and asking them to report their opinions of the governor throughout the viewing. He found that Christie’s shtick now seemed to wear thin much more quickly than it used to. Five minutes into the video most voters said they liked him; after ten minutes their views began to dim; and by the thirty-minute mark respondents were almost uniformly repulsed by Christie’s trademark cockiness and bravado. “They couldn’t stand him,” remarked one donor after seeing the research.

  Chapter Twelve

  Seeing the Light

  What about religious liberty?”

  Bobby Jindal was huddled with a small group of advisers in his spacious, sunlit office at the Louisiana governor’s mansion, trying to decide what he should say at the Ronald Reagan library in a couple of months. He was scheduled to speak on February 13, 2014, and his inner circle was determined to use the appearance at one of the holiest sites in all of Republicanism to finally shed the malaise that had settled over Jindal’s political profile.

  But engineering a pitch-perfect breakout performance was proving tricky. The audience inside the room at the Reagan library would be made up of serious-minded Republican elites—the kind who had once fawned over Jindal’s wonky smarts and polished credentials. But to be effective, the speech would also need to reach a broader audience of carnivorous conservative activists—people who wouldn’t take notice of the governor unless he was serving up a heaping platter of red meat.

  There was discussion among the governor and his aides of Jindal recycling the economic speech he had been giving all year. But Curt Anderson, his media consultant, thought the topic was a snoozer.

  “That’s a really great speech, and you’ll give it some more,” Anderson told Jindal. “The problem with that speech is, serious people really enjoy it, but it’s not something that crowds get fired up about.”

  That’s when Timmy Teepell, an evangelical who was homeschooled as a kid and remained tapped into the Christian grass roots, suggested making the address about religious liberty. The issue had taken on a growing urgency in Jindal’s mind lately, as he watched secular liberals adopt an increasingly triumphalist attitude toward traditional Christians, spurred on by a series of gay rights victories. Jindal had been searching for the right venue to voice his concerns about this cultural development, and he thrilled to the idea of making his case at the Reagan library.

  Anderson was uneasy about the idea. He told Jindal the topic seemed “kind of obscure” for such a prestigious speech, and he was worried that it would come off as esoteric. After all, Jindal needed to get people talking about him again—and religious liberty was not exactly top of mind in American political discourse at the moment.

  But all that changed on December 18, 2013, when GQ posted its profile of Phil Robertson online. The bearded patriarch from A&E’s monster-hit reality show Duck Dynasty—a feel-good series about a family of proud country Christians who got rich selling duck-hunting merchandise—was quoted in the piece crudely musing about the superiority of heterosexual intercourse (“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus”) and the sinfulness of homosexuality (“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleepin
g around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men…”). The outcry from gay rights advocates was loud and immediate, with the Left threatening boycotts of A&E as long as Robertson was on the air. When the network responded by suspending Robertson indefinitely, religious conservatives pushed back, arguing that the cable star was only expressing a biblical view of sexual ethics, and that left-wing bullies were now punishing him for exercising his right to free speech. Insults were hurled, hashtags were born, chyrons flashed across cable news screens. It was a week before Christmas and, in the spirit of the season, America had fumbled its way into yet another bitter culture war battle.

  In Baton Rouge, Robertson’s antigay quotes arrived like manna from heaven. Jindal couldn’t have scripted a national pageant of umbrage more perfectly suited for him to take a starring role. Duck Dynasty was filmed in Louisiana, and Jindal had been close with the Robertson family for years. He had been searching for the perfect example to illustrate the secular Left’s hostility toward conservative Christians, and now it was playing out in his own backwater backyard.

  As soon as A&E announced the suspension, Jindal gathered his staff and began drafting a statement in support of Robertson. Not everyone was on board, though. Anderson raised an obvious political concern.

  “This may play well in Louisiana, and other places in the South, but we don’t know how this will play everywhere else,” he said.

  Jindal was defiant: “I don’t care.” The Robertsons were his friends, and he wasn’t going to let fears of being seen as uncouth among the country’s coastal snobs prevent him from speaking up.

  But other aides made a more high-minded case against going out on a limb for Robertson. They argued that the quotes published in GQ were coarse, at best, and at worst abhorrent. Not only had Robertson graphically ranked the preferability of certain sex acts; he had also, later in the story, cheerfully shrugged off the history of racial oppression in the Jim Crow south. “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person,” Robertson was quoted as saying. “Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say. Were they happy? They were godly. They were happy. No one was singing the blues.”

  Did Jindal really want to aggressively defend language like this? the staff contrarians asked. Wasn’t this the exact kind of damaging, unthoughtful, “stupid” rhetoric that just a year ago Jindal was calling on his party to purge?

  Jindal sympathized with their arguments, but he also knew it wasn’t often in politics that an easy pitch like this gets lobbed at you, and he wasn’t about to let it sail over the plate.

  “That’s not the point,” he replied. The point was that no one should be banished from public life for expressing an unpopular viewpoint that appears in the Bible.

  He tried to appease the holdouts on his team by assuring them that he would make “passing acknowledgment” of the fact that, while he supported Robertson, he wasn’t a fan of his friend’s choice of words.

  But when the statement went out to press the next day, even that caveat was missing.

  “Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the state of Louisiana,” Jindal’s statement read. “The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with. I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.”

  (For the statement’s kicker, the governor had originally proposed Britney Spears standing in as the symbol of cultural decay, but one of his aides suggested swapping out the aging pop star for the more topical twerker.)

  Jindal was the first prominent politician to publicly defend the Robertsons, and his swift, hard-hitting response turned him into a lead cast member in this culture war pageant. While other high-profile Republicans—from Chris Christie to Rand Paul—steered clear of the confrontation, the governor of Louisiana was busy firing off a barrage of tweets, press releases, and made-for-cable sound bites that decried the Left’s assault on religious freedom. And when A&E was ultimately forced to walk back its initial statement on the GQ story and quietly reinstate their once-shunned star, it was Jindal who received much of the credit from religious conservatives.

  In the end, even the staff naysayers had to admit the wisdom in charging full speed into the Duck Dynasty kerfuffle. “It was a good nexus of what he believed, and what was politically good, too,” one adviser later conceded to me. Jindal was now basking in the celestial bliss of the conservative movement’s adoration. By sacrificing a small bit of nuance at the altar of populism, he was once again being elevated as a bold and courageous leader.

  He had seen the light, and he was not about to retreat back into the darkness.

  Though Jindal didn’t hesitate to make partisan hay out of the religious freedom issue while he scrambled toward 2016, the concept of unfettered worship was in fact deeply personal for him—rooted in a tumultuous and dramatic conversion, and a disorienting night in 1987 that would change his life and politics forever.

  The lights were lowered in the chapel, and the projector screens high above the stage filled with scenes—taken from a 1979 adaptation of the Gospel of Luke called The Jesus Film—of a naked, whip-scarred Savior hanging despondently from a cross. A choir of wide-eyed teenagers below the screen belted out the opening notes of a contemporary Christian electronic-pop song, “This Blood Is for You,” and then a soloist leaned into the microphone and began lending graphic description of Christ’s suffering with a soulful recitation of the spoken lyrics.

  Laced with chips of bone they beat him hard,

  From his shoulders to his feet!

  And it sliced right through his olive skin,

  Just like razors through a sheet.

  Sixteen-year-old Bobby Jindal sat in the second row of the audience, taking in the spectacle with a mix of bafflement and wonder. He had been invited to the production, held at a nondenominational church near Louisiana State University called The Chapel on the Campus, by his best friend, Kent, a born-again Christian with a penchant for evangelizing. Jindal, who was Hindu, had taken an intellectual interest in Christianity, mostly to humor his friend, but to him the religion existed primarily as a day-to-day mundanity of life in the Deep South. Christianity for him was LSU football players pointing to the sky after big plays, and omnipresent church marquees lining the streets, and Jesus fish bumper stickers dotting sedans, and pretty girls chattering on Monday mornings about the weekend youth group activities they had attended.

  Now, all of a sudden, it felt like much more than that.

  In Jindal’s accounts of the evening, decades later, he would paper over the specifics of this production, perhaps embarrassed that such a dated, unstylish performance was what planted the seeds of conversion in him. But the Christian God is famously disinclined to bestow tasteful spiritual epiphanies, and he chose this moment to touch Jindal’s heart. By the time the choir erupted into the song’s chorus, he was overwhelmed with a sense that the violence he was watching Jesus endure was somehow suffered for him personally.

  The choir sang, and Jindal’s mind raced.

  This blood can save the soul!

  Heal the sick! Mend the heart!

  This blood can give you access,

  To the very throne of God!

  When the song ended, Todd Hinkie, a square-faced college student who served as the church’s youth pastor, stood and invited those who wanted to learn more about Jesus to come talk to him. Jindal sprang from his seat and made a beeline for Hinkie, cutting in front of other audience members in order to grab the pastor’s hand. Jindal began talking a mile a minute as he pumped
Hinkie’s arm in a frenzied handshake.

  “Sir, my name is Bobby Jindal; I’m Kent’s friend. I really have a lot of questions about Christianity and Christ and the Bible, and to be honest with you, my friends who are Christians, they just can’t answer these questions. Can I by chance meet with you?”

  A few days later, Jindal met Hinkie at LSU’s student union, and the two found a quiet table in the corner where they could talk. Jindal was carrying a long yellow legal pad covered in his own handwriting, and the moment they sat down, he catapulted into his grilling.

  “Okay, here’s my first question…” Jindal began.

  Hinkie, who later recounted the experience to me, was taken aback as he realized that this teenager had scribbled down several pages’ worth of theological queries, and he tried to slow him down.

  “Hang on, let me tell you the ground rules, dude,” Hinkie said. “This is awesome that you have all these questions, but I know I don’t have all the answers. So here’s what I’ll do: I will do my best to direct you to the answers that are in the scriptures, instead of just giving my opinions. If we can’t answer the questions directly out of the Bible, I’ll write them down and bring them to people who are smarter than me. Does that work?”

  Jindal, impatient and unmoved by this pastorly show of deference to a book he was still quite skeptical of, waved him off. Yeah. Sure. Whatever.

  “Now, here’s my first question…”

  To start, Jindal wanted to know about the man he had seen depicted the other night writhing in agony on the cross, and why God had selected such a sadistic and irrational method of achieving salvation for his children.

  “Why did that man have to die for my sins?” Jindal asked. “Why couldn’t God just say, ‘Okay, your sins are forgiven’? I don’t get it.”

  Hinkie took him through the Bible verses that illustrated the competing universal demands of divine mercy and justice, the incompatibility of man’s sinful nature and God’s holiness, the sacrifice Jesus made on behalf of all mankind. Jindal was mesmerized by the doctrine, and insatiably curious. Up until now, his religious views had been restricted to the Hinduism of his parents; now Christianity was providing him with a whole new theological galaxy to explore.