New Jersey Governor Chris Christie addresses the delegates.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie addresses the delegates. Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

“Let’s do something fun,” Chris Christie said at the Republican National Convention last night. The Governor of New Jersey had spent the past day in less expansive emotional states—defending Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech on the “Today” show, expressing his own disappointment that Mike Pence was the Republican Vice-Presidential pick—and he seemed due for some pleasure. Christie told the delegates that he, a famously truculent former federal prosecutor, would present an indictment against Hillary Clinton, and they would get to judge whether she was guilty or innocent.

The crowd on the floor, gossipy and distracted when Paul Ryan spoke, a few minutes earlier, grew attentive. This was the case that Christie had been promising he would make against Clinton since early in his own Presidential campaign. “As a flawed evaluator of dictators,” Christie asked, suggesting that the former of Secretary of State had been too ready to reset relations with Russia, “is Hillary Clinton guilty or not guilty?” He asked for verdicts on Clinton’s competence (“as an inept negotiator”) and for being weak toward the Syrian regime (“as an awful judge of the character of a dictator-butcher in the Middle East”). The floor, following the California delegation’s lead, chanted, “Lock her up!” Christie said, “I’m getting there.”

If Christie was pursuing Clinton last night, he was also being pursued. Earlier in the day, Christie’s mentor and appointee David Samson, who was once the chairman of the Port Authority, had pleaded guilty to shaking down United Airlines to keep them from cancelling a direct flight that he took to his vacation home. The case against Samson grew out of the investigation into the Christie administration’s vindictive George Washington Bridge lane closures, which presses on. Even during his political ascent, Christie was a creature of grievance and emotion, an open wound, a human tumult machine. When he gave the keynote speech at the 2012 Republican Convention, Christie got three-quarters of the way through a talk about himself (eighty paragraphs into the written version) before he said the name of the candidate, Mitt Romney. This time, Christie had expected to be named Donald Trump’s running mate and when he found out that he wouldn’t be, the Governor turned “livid,” Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, reportedly told friends.

Still, Christie appeared on the “Today” show yesterday, to insist, a little humiliatingly, that “ninety-three per cent” of Melania Trump’s speech had not been plagiarized. He was also asked how he felt about being passed over by Trump. The Governor said that he didn’t want to “sugarcoat it,” and that he was disappointed. “If you compete for something like I did, you’d like to be picked. I wasn’t. So you take a deep breath, and you go to bed, and you wake up the next morning and get on with your day,” he said. The general opinion was that Christie had debased himself and had gotten nothing for it. The more specific opinion, among the New Jersey delegation on the Convention floor, was that the emoting was all very Christie. “I almost think when he does something like that, he makes himself vulnerable to the public,” Maria DiGiovanni, the mayor of Hackettstown, said.

Christie’s defining characteristic as a politician is his relentlessness. He has conducted a hundred and thirty-five town halls across his state, promising help for local problems and haranguing public-school teachers. But he also has a special sensitivity to the complex character of his state: after Hurricane Sandy, Christie was the nostalgist of the boardwalks, but he also nominated the first Muslim judge to the New Jersey Superior Court, in 2011, and heatedly defended the man’s patriotism and qualifications against an angry Islamophobic wave of resistance. Christie’s persona—that Springsteen/“Sopranos” amalgam—has always seemed a touch on the nose, as if it he had sketched himself. On the “Today” show, yesterday, Christie dealt amiably with rumors that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had opposed putting Christie on the ticket. (In 2005, Christie, as the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, sent Kushner’s father to prison.) “I understand that’s a sort of Shakespearean thing that people want to write about,” Christie said. And maybe it was.

Read more of our latest news and commentary from the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
Read more of our latest news and commentary from the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

New Jersey Republican officials are a prosperous and pragmatic clan, and by now they have generally made their peace with Donald Trump, as Christie has. “If you want to be a delegate from New Jersey, you really need to be a Trump delegate,” Henry Kuhl, who was attending his eleventh convention, pointed out. The main feeling among New Jersey’s fifty-one delegates was that Christie and Trump shared certain attributes: plainspokenness, an executive talent, perhaps an allergy to ideology. “It’s not my particular style, but he’s effective,” a delegate named Mary O’Brien said of Trump. Next to her, a delegate named John Traier said that he was disappointed that the national Republican platform was so starkly opposed to gay and lesbian rights, but added that he was pleased that the New Jersey delegation had supported equality. “Baby steps,” Traier said. On the broader matter of Trump he was serene. “Every so often the Party goes through a metamorphosis,” he said.

 

Up on the stage, Christie was completing one of his own. During his Presidential campaign, Christie had subdued his talk of American immigrant diversity in favor of a skepticism about Syrian refugees, and now he shed the sentiment and the lugubriousness, the parts of his character that least matched Trump’s. Some act of interior whittling had taken place. On Monday, when the mood in the Convention was dark and nationalistic, Christie had been said to be polishing his speech; by Tuesday it was full of the prosecutor’s blacks and whites, the high moral tone of a man eyed by a grand jury himself. “In Libya and Nigeria—guilty,” Christie said of Clinton. “In China and Syria—guilty. In Iran and Russia and Cuba—guilty.” Christie had maneuvered into place. Already Trump has said that Christie will lead his Presidential transition team. The talk among the New Jersey delegation was that he’d also make a fine attorney general.