He’s back. The former New Jersey governor and unsuccessful 2016 GOP presidential candidate has been hitting the press with a new book, “Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden.”
Called by former GOP New Jersey governor and mentor Tom Kean “the most able politician since Bill Clinton,” Chris Christie seems to have sensed that the coast is clear for him to start criticizing his fellow Republicans now that the Trump era is increasingly being seen in a rearview mirror.
Interestingly, it was an era ushered in by Christie, who abandoned his own bid to support Trump — without consulting his supporters — and unsuccessfully vied for a position in the Trump administration.
Now after a few years of political wandering and contracting COVID at one of President Trump’s no-mask events, Christie appears to have seized the moment to re-invent himself as a visionary Republican.
A quick glance through Christie’s new book — the first was the 2019 “Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics”— shows how just astute he is.
Here the former prosecutor is able to both criticize former President Trump’s meritless claim that the 2020 election was fixed and the ensuing January 6, 2021, insurrection while defending the former president from political enemies.
Christie is also astute enough to season his comments with a blend of fact and innuendo that just may appeal to Trump supporters looking for someone to back.
That seems to be the case in the chapter “Media,” in which the Christie, an ABC commentator, calls out the usual suspects “Big Tech” and “Big Media.”
Of the former, after criticizing Twitter for canceling Trump’s account while still allowing actual dictators to use it, suggestively argues “these Big Tech companies are dominating the marketplace in ways that have made Facebook, for instance, the world’s second trillion-dollar corporation, after Apple. And some of the other companies aren’t that far behind. Their wealth gives them power. Their monopoles give them power. And it’s a dangerous combination when they start deciding which views can be expressed and which views will be silenced. Our forefathers would be appalled at that misuse of the First Amendment.”
Ever the prosecutor, Christie continues by using rhetorical devices to direct the argument: “Why do you think Republicans are so upset about this, other than the broken promises, the legal overstepping, and the maddening arrogance?
Well, because they have eye and ears and brains. Most Republicans recognize that the politics in Silicon Valley lean heavily to the left. It can’t be an accident that the people Bic Tech chooses to censor — and not only Trump — are almost all figures on the right.”
Then he turns to the media and says, “As Republicans we’ve spent decades dealing with a Big Media culture that is almost always stacked against us. For good reason, we’ve grown highly suspect of their biases. And those biases have never been more pronounced than in recent years. The Trump era brought a new crescendo of this, the way certain media outlets became passionate advocates for the president and even more became his equally passionate adversaries. All that choosing up sides exploited divisions that were already present in our politics – then proceed to severely exacerbate them.
“Look at NBC and MSNBC and the people hosting programs there, programs that used to be places of equal-opportunity scrutiny, programs like the grandfather of all the Sunday shows, Meet the Press. When Tim Russert was hosting, both Democrats and Republicans got his tough interrogations, despite his Democratic pedigree. The same was true of most of the show’s previous hosts going all the way back to 1947. Well, no more. Not with Chuck Todd in the chair. He is a complete liberal advocate each and every Sunday, a reflexive booster of Democratic progressive causes and a relentless opponent to whichever conservative Republican happens to appear. It’s much the same equation at CNN, which used to brand itself as the place for down-the-middle news, planted in the ground between right-leaning Fox and left-leaning MSNBC.
“No one makes that claim about CNN anymore, including the people who work there. It’s not just the bias of Big Media. It’s also the cynicism. And there’s no better case study than CNN.”
Here Christie presents a credible argument on how media creates and builds on an interest to generate ratings and income. “In 2015 and 2016, no network gave more airtime to Donald Trump than CNN did. The reason was simple. It was super-profitable programming. In 2016, CNN had one of its best years ever, and Trump got more airtime than any of the network’s full-time hosts. They’d carry Trump’s speeches uninterrupted for an hour or two at a time and spend the next six hours analyzing every ‘lock her up’ and ‘build that wall.’ And the ratings shot up some more.”
Then, he writes, Trump won, and CNN spent the next four years attacking everything about him: “His policies. His family. His character. His appointments. His ethics. His Twitter posts. His hair. If they ever missed an opportunity to air a negative Trump story, it was only because those minutes were filled with another negative Trump story.”
Christie argues that as long as Trump was good for network profits, he was lavished with unimpeded airtime until they discovered he won the election against “the candidate they were confident was the inevitable next president, Hillary Clinton. When that proved to be a major miscalculation, the media had to change their approach to Trump. He had to remain a source of massive profits, but he also had to be destroyed. In the end, he proved to be even more profitable as a target than he’d been as a hero, as the networks turned right around and used the same platform to try to destroy him.”
After laying out his perception of the situation with the media, Christie asks, “So, what’s the answer for Republicans? It isn’t simply to seek out right-leaning media that’s equally biased in the opposite direction and accept those distortions unquestioningly. Our job isn’t to swallow whatever slant any of them dish up. That would leave us just as sorry as our narrow-minded adversaries. In fact, we can do much better than that.”
The answer? “We have to stand up and speak the truth about everything. When we see things that are wrong, when people on our side behave in ways that are problematic, when our TV talking heads spew unsupported trash, Republicans need to speak up loudly. We need to call the distortions what they are – distortions. We have to stay loyal to the truth. When Fox News airs coverage that’s plainly biased, when NewsMax pretends some falsehood is true, when OAN goes down another rabbit hole, we have to say loudly and clearly, “Hold on a second …This is wrong… What’s the evidence for that?” The truth also requires that we call out the bias and lies of CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and other traditional liberal media outlets.”
And for “Big Tech”? Christie argues for the removal of the Telecommunications Act of 1989’s civil immunity for website platforms.
Calling such protections “unjust,” Christie notes, “The tech titans are big boys and girls now. Their companies are well established and mega-rich. They should be able to stand on their own two feet, including in an American courtroom. If they want to start banning people from their platforms, if they’re picking and choosing whose speech is acceptable and whose is not, if they want to play all those political games, then it’s time for them to be held legally accountable the same way other companies are.”
Astutely putting the blame on both parties that found political advantage from both tech and media, Christie then sprinkles on the Trumpian “enemy of the people” spice and adds, “Big Tech and Big Media have created these problems, and it’s their job to solve them. We all must hold them accountable — or, next, they will ban your beloved, strongly held beliefs.”
After evoking President Ronald Reagan, who “always stood up for the truth” (except when his memory failed him during the Iran-Contra hearings), Christie says, “Republicans must stand for the truth — and not just sometimes.
“We must call out Joe Biden for characterizing legitimate election integrity laws as ‘Jim Crow 2.0.’ We must stand up and call out Marjorie Taylor Green for equating COVID-19 restrictions with Nazi atrocities. We must hold Nancy Pelosi’s feet to the fire of truth when she lies about Republicans being the party of ‘defund the police.’ We must say it’s wrong to undermine our democracy by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen when no evidence exists to prove it.
“How do Republicans win elections again and regain the power to get America off he disastrously wrong track of Joe Biden? By standing up to all media — social and mainstream — the only way we credibly can. By telling the truth. By telling it like it is. All the time.”
And while Christie’s rhetoric is right and the Republican Party would benefit from clear and honest thinking, the former governor needs to look back, read newspaper reports like the NJ Advance article “Christie’s biggest lies,” and show that he can walk and just not talk big — as he did when he was the least popular governor on record and an unsuccessful presidential candidate.
— Dan Aubrey
Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden, Chris Christie, 304 pages, $28, Simon & Schuster, Threshold Editions.
