In those final days of the election, there was much talk of whether Trump would accede to the peaceful transfer of power after his inevitably disastrous defeat to Clinton, who was projected by some to win Republican redoubts in the Sun Belt and maybe even in the South.
Trump, who was famously incapable of handling public embarrassment, was about to be embarrassed worse than any major-party presidential nominee since 1984, when Democratic candidate Walter F. Mondale managed to defeat Ronald Reagan only in his home state of Minnesota. “Donald Trump is going to get his ass kicked,” predicted a writer for the news site Deadspin. He added that “this isn’t close, and never was.”
Some people on Trump’s own team plainly saw it that way too, especially after the revelation of Trump’s boorish remarks on the Access Hollywood tape. Hillary was going to campaign in Arizona. Donald was going home. Bannon later said he remained certain that Trump would win even after Access Hollywood, but many others thought the renegade campaign was being finally handed the comeuppance it had long deserved.
Among those who apparently figured doom was approaching in those final weeks of the campaign was Chris Christie. The portly, bombastic Republican governor of New Jersey had spent the years before the 2016 presidential election as head of the Republican Governors Association, boosting the prospects of GOP candidates while raising his profile in midwestern and southern states. He planned to run for president as a sensible, solution-seeking Republican, one who would take on public-sector employees and Islamic terrorists, and still have time to watch a ball game, hotdog in hand.
That image of the capable chief executive suffered greatly from the Bridgegate scandal, the 2013 politically motivated lane closures on the George Washington Bridge between Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Manhattan, ordered by Christie’s top aides. Though Christie’s popularity plummeted at home, his campaign advisers believed he had a chance to prevail in a crowded primary field by being louder, and punching harder, than Republican counterparts unsuited to the style of combat that was Christie’s expertise. If anyone dared to bring up Bridgegate, he would simply shout them down.
There was one unexpected problem with this approach: Trump. There was room on the right for many varieties of conservatism, but there was not room for two bombastic bridge-and-tunnel strivers. Christie understood this, jabbing at Trump as the primary season commenced. Trump answered with shattering uppercuts. Ahead of the critical New Hampshire primary, Trump gave it to Christie on the nose: “Chris can’t win because of his past. I don’t believe you’ve heard the last of the George Washington Bridge, because there’s no way he didn’t know about the closure of the George Washington Bridge. And all of his people are now going on trial in the very near future. And they’re going on criminal trial. There’s no way he didn’t know about it.”
Trump won New Hampshire, while Christie, who had been campaigning there relentlessly since as early as 2014, finished an inconsequential sixth. The following day, February 10, 2016, Christie suspended his presidential campaign. “I have both won elections that I was supposed to lose and I’ve lost elections I was supposed to win and what that means is you never know what will happen. That is both the magic and the mystery of politics—you never quite know when which is going to happen, even when you think you do,” Christie wrote on Facebook.
Two weeks later, Christie surprised just about everyone by endorsing Trump, becoming the first national Republican figure to do so. “I will lend my support between now and November in any way for Donald,” Christie said at an event in Fort Worth, Texas. He looked pained as he spoke, as if praising Trump’s character and political acumen caused him deep physical discomfort. Here was a man humiliated, for all to see and many to mock.
The mockery was relentless, but Christie’s calculation looked increasingly clever as Trump muscled Republican competitors out of the way. Remaining a loyal surrogate for Trump, Christie hoped for a position in an eventual Trump administration, should that unlikely reality ever come to pass. But his ambitions were always going to have a check in Jared Kushner. In 2004, when Christie was a U.S. attorney in New Jersey, he prosecuted Jared’s father, the developer Charles Kushner, on charges of tax evasion, improper campaign contributions, and witness tampering. The last of these referred to a scheme in which Charles Kushner had a prostitute seduce his brother-in-law, who had become a government witness. The covertly recorded encounter was sent to his wife, Charles Kushner’s sister Esther. This was preposterously illegal. Charles Kushner went to prison for fourteen months. Jared Kushner never forgot the insult. When it came time for Trump to select a vice presidential nominee in the summer of 2016, Christie yearned for the job, only to have Kushner frustrate his desires. The vice presidential nomination went instead to Mike Pence, the conservative governor of Indiana who had as much in common with Trump as he did with the emir of Qatar.
Still, Christie had endorsed Trump when few others would, and now he wanted something, anything, in return. Christie remained by Trump’s side despite his wife Mary Pat’s loathing for the candidate.
The loyalty paid off, if perhaps not nearly to the extent Christie had hoped. On May 9, Trump named Christie to lead his presidential transition team. The Republican National Convention was still months away, but Trump had just won the Indiana primary and, in doing so, vanquished his last two Republican rivals for the nomination: Senator Cruz of Texas and Governor John R. Kasich of Ohio. Though some wanted them to keep fighting, no remotely realistic configuration of delegates gave either one a shot at victory. Trump was their man, whether Republicans liked it or not.
Presidential campaigns customarily began planning for the transition long before any votes were counted on Election Day. The precedent was set by Jimmy Carter, who during the 1976 presidential election started his transition planning after winning the Pennsylvania primary that spring. Early transition planning came to be seen as a public good, something to be encouraged. In 2010, Congress passed the Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act, which deemed “that certain transition services shall be available to eligible candidates before the general election.” The goal was to stimulate transition planning by partly subsidizing it.
Even so, few campaigns devoted sufficient time to the presidential transition, which Max Stier, founder and head of the Partnership for Public Service, deemed “the moment before the Big Bang,” when all the ingredients for the presidency itself had to be meticulously assembled. “You’re talking about the takeover of the most complicated, largest, consequential organization not just on the planet, but in history,” explained Stier, the nation’s foremost expert on the presidential transition, both as it had been and as it should be. “Transition planning has to begin a year out.”
Yet transition planning would be worthless unless and until preceded by a November triumph. Accordingly, most campaigns put off the former while focusing on the latter. Hillary Clinton did not start planning her own transition until mid-August, though the pace of transition planning accelerated in October, when her victory seemed certain.
In a statement announcing the formation of his transition team, Trump called Christie “an extremely knowledgeable and loyal person,” while Christie vowed that he’d be “putting together a first rate team.” There were ominous signs, however: Kushner would also be involved in the transition, making it unlikely that Christie would have as much freedom as he wanted. There was also the inevitability of Clinton’s win, which loomed like a thunderhead over the Trump campaign. Any moment now, she was going to finally dispatch her pesky primary challenger, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, and make a tight, fast turn toward the general election. It took her a little longer than many thought it should, but by late August, she had finally shaken off Sanders and was leading Trump by twelve points.
Though signs of defeat were legion, Christie set about doing his work with the help of trusted New Jersey aides like Richard H. Bagger and William J. Palatucci, the governor’s closest adviser. Both had been through many a Trenton brawl, but this
was the presidency, not New Jersey. Some saw them as unsuited to the task of building out an administration. Bannon, never one to police and moderate his own views, came to regard them as “total fucking New Jersey scam artists.”
Stylistic differences aside, they committed what Bannon saw as an unpardonable sin: “They never had any faith in Trump.” It was a charge that Bannon and other loyalists would later level—sometimes fairly and sometimes not—when things would go awry in the White House. As they saw it, at least Democrats were open in their loathing of Trump. More insidious, in their eyes, were Republicans who quietly subverted Trump’s will even as they made public shows of loyalty.
Just hours after Bannon was appointed to lead the Trump campaign in August, he watched as the candidate ripped into Christie. The reason was a news report about Christie’s fund-raising on behalf of the transition effort.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Trump bellowed at Christie, who sat across from the candidate on a sofa, trying desperately to defend himself. “I want to shut the whole thing down.”
Bannon stood to the side, watching. He had never met Christie before, but he knew that the New Jersey governor was right. He tried to pacify Trump by explaining that they had to run a transition, and that to run a transition, they needed money. Trump wouldn’t have it. “You’re jinxing me,” he complained, pointing to the wasted transition effort of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign. It also felt like Christie was raising money that should have been directed to the Trump campaign itself. Finally, though, Bannon won out.
“Fine,” Trump conceded. “But no more fucking raising money.”
The campaign continued, with Clinton remaining ahead but never quite pulling away. Then came October 7, a Friday. A hurricane threatened Florida. In Wisconsin, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan prepared to campaign with Trump the following day. Trump and his advisers were at Trump Tower in Manhattan, getting ready for a presidential debate. That afternoon, the Washington Post published its account of the Access Hollywood tape. The denunciations of Democrats were expected; it was the denunciations of Republicans that were astonishing. Condoleezza Rice, who had served as secretary of state under George W. Bush, voiced the conclusion many of her mainstream conservative colleagues had reached, some of them long before the infamous recording emerged: “He should withdraw.” Speaker Ryan told congressional Republicans on a call to “do what’s best for you and your district,” a signal that he was leaving the Trump campaign to its own devices. The joint rally in Wisconsin never took place.
Bannon later said that Access Hollywood was when he knew that Trump was going to win. Whether this was retroactive mythology or an understanding of what motivated Trump’s base would be impossible to say. The way he would tell it, he wanted the campaign purged of anyone of wavering conviction. In this group was Christie. Bannon focused his ire on the bombastic but insecure governor. “The plane leaves at eleven o’clock in the morning,” Bannon said of what he would come to call Billy Bush Saturday, and of Christie’s fall from grace that day. “If you’re on the plane, you’re on the team. Didn’t make the plane.”
Christie stayed off the plane in the days to come. The second of three presidential debates was that Sunday evening in St. Louis. Despite supposedly being one of Trump’s closest advisers, Christie was not there. Nor had he appeared on the Sunday talk shows that morning, though he had been slated to do so. The following Tuesday, Christie, a sports radio enthusiast, did speak to WFAN Sports Radio, a New York–area station, where he denounced Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood tape. “It is completely indefensible, and I won’t defend it and haven’t defended it,” Christie said. “That kind of talk and conversation, even in private, is just unacceptable.”
That may have been the moment when Christie doomed his chances of a job within the Trump administration. It would be impossible to overstate just how much those around Trump came to dislike the New Jersey governor. Even though the lines of enmity and suspicion in the eventual Trump administration were complex, they also coalesced around a couple of well-known nodes. One was Reince Priebus, routinely dismissed by colleagues as a “nice enough guy,” in the words of someone who saw plenty of Priebus in the West Wing. The other was Christie. There were words for him, but they were not nice words. They were words like “pussy” and “coward,” which those around Trump spat out with magnificent loathing.
Even as Christie seemed to go missing, the transition continued, however pointless the task may have seemed. Scott H. Amey, a lawyer for the Project on Government Oversight, remembered meeting in late October with Palatucci inside Trump’s transition offices in Washington. Amey came with Norman L. Eisen, who had served as the chief ethics lawyer for President Obama, and Thomas M. Susman, a veteran Washington lawyer with an expertise in government affairs. The trio wanted the presidential campaigns to sign on to a “new and improved ethics pledge,” as Amey described it, that would curb the influence of lobbyists and access-peddlers on the federal government. At least the Trump campaign had agreed to meet; the Clinton campaign ignored the request.
The three lawyers sat with Palatucci for about an hour, presenting him with their pledge. “He leafed through it and asked a few specific questions about the contents and definitions,” Amey recalled. But what really stood out to him was the apparent state of the transition, just three weeks from the presidential election. “It was very dead.” There were “empty cubicles and empty desks.” The lights were off.
“Not a good sign,” Amey thought as he left the desolate offices.
A staffer told Bannon the same thing, that the Trump transition headquarters in Washington was “crickets.”
Bannon asked why.
“Palatucci and those guys,” the staffer answered.
Bannon wasn’t surprised. He thought “the New Jersey mafia” had only gone to work for Trump because, if he managed to win, “they were going to be the lobbyists and beat the inside fixers and make a shit ton of money.” Yet he was too concerned with the campaign’s endgame to care much about the New Jersey guys in their empty Washington offices.
(This author attempted to engage Palatucci in conversation about the transition on a number of occasions. Eventually, Palatucci agreed to answer some questions by email, then decided against it. He sent a statement that said the Christie transition had been “professional, comprehensive, and ready on election day to advise the president-elect on all matters.” Suffice it to say that of the many high-ranking transition staffers I spoke to for this book, not a single one shared anything even remotely approaching this sunny view.)
Christie showed up at Trump Tower on election night, and attempted to ingratiate himself with the man about to be elected president. Trump was “cold as ice,” remembered Bannon, who also didn’t take well to Christie’s transparent last-minute attempts to sidle back into the fold. At one point, Christie told Trump that Obama had called him. Christie said that Obama would call back on the governor’s phone, at which point he would pass that phone to Trump. A notorious germaphobe, Trump grew enraged. “Hey Chris,” he said, “you know my fucking phone number. Just give it to the president. I don’t want your fucking phone.” Christie tried to write some of Trump’s victory speech, delivered early that Wednesday morning, and tried to sidle into photographs of the Trump team as the president-elect addressed a gobsmacked nation. This too went over poorly.
The transition was to hold its first meeting on Thursday, two days after the victory, with a presentation to Trump on Friday. That Wednesday, Trump was preparing to head to Washington to meet with Obama when Kushner called Bannon. “Trump wants to get rid of Christie tonight,” said Kushner, who despised Christie for having sent his father to prison. “Immediately.”
Vicious as Bannon could be to underlings and opponents, he had no interest in dealing with Christie when so many more important matters were at hand. “I don’t know Christie,” he pleaded. “You’re the guy.” Kushner said he was not going to be the guy. Bannon would have to
be the executioner.
It happened as the full transition team met on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. Bannon’s assistant summoned Christie, sending him down to the crack den, where Bannon had a glass-walled office near the elevator banks.
Anyone who walked by that afternoon would have seen a spectacle. For four hours, Bannon remembers, Christie pleaded with Bannon to keep his job. People put their faces up to the glass, wondering what was taking so long. Bannon wondered too. Long after, he remained incredulous about the episode. “I mean, I’m the head of this, and I’m taking four hours with this guy.” If other enmities had cooled by late 2018, this one still had not. Bannon could only remember Christie with oceanic revulsion, wondering if the New Jersey governor was “psychologically fucked up.” Bannon had no reason to believe this, but he believed it all the same. “He’s not an adult in the way he thinks about things,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s because he’s so grossly overweight or if it’s something else. There’s something that is psychologically not right with this guy.” Two years of many other battles waged had done nothing to soften this view.
Christie only deepened his own humiliation, making ineffectual appeals he had to have known were not going to sway Bannon. “She’s going to be all over my ass,” he said of his wife, Mary Pat, who had been telling him for months to “cut bait on Trump.” He had stayed, waiting for the reward he knew he deserved. He was supposed to have been the vice president. And now what was he? “The only reason I took the transition is I’m supposed to be chief of staff,” he said. Now he had nothing to show for staying with Trump, not to himself nor to Mary Pat nor to what few political supporters he still had. Christie sunk into self-pity. “I’m so fucked,” he said.
The Best People Page 5