Chris Christie's Tutorial in Hubris - Frank Bruni
We can scoff and sneer at those images of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on his beachfront imperium, or we can learn from them. As he took in the sun, he doled out a lesson, the same one that Donald Trump is delivering on a daily basis and in a grander fashion:
Beware the politician who doesn’t give a damn for decorum. What he markets as irreverence can be something coarser and more perverse.
It can lead to ruin. Christie’s approval rating from New Jersey voters was just 15 percent — the lowest for any current governor in the country and the worst in his state’s history — before his weekend repose on what turned out to be quicksand. He could sink into single digits after this. Negative integers aren’t entirely out of the question.
I hope Trump is watching, but I have my doubts. The Christie family’s swimwear pageant isn’t the kind that he’s known to ogle. Plus, he surely turns the channel when the visage on the screen isn’t his own.
The stories of the disgraced New Jersey governor and the disgraceful American president overlap. Christie was “Trump before Trump,” Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa in an article published late Monday. “He does what he wants to do, and his success can be traced to that. But there are consequences, of course, when you work that way.”
Steele could as easily have been talking about Trump, and when Costa referred to the “defiance that has both lifted and hobbled Christie’s political career,” he brought to mind Trump’s temperament and trajectory, whether he meant to or not.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/opinion/chris-christie-beach-trump.html?emc=edit_th_20170705&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284
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