Chris Christie

Governor Christie's book "Let Me Finish" is a memoir of his political life, and especially of his time working with Donald Trump on his 2016 Presidential Campaign. Governor Christie was one of the many Republican candidates for President in 2016, but saw the inevitability of Trump's winning the nomination, and became one of the first to endorse Trump for President after he himself dropped out of the Campaign. Christie campaigned for Trump, and after the nomination, was chosen to lead the Trump transition team. However, just before Trump was to assume office, Mr. Christie was unceremoniously dumped from the transition team effort. Unlike a number of others fired from the White House team, Mr. Christie seems to have remained supportive of the President, and this book is not an anti-Trump book. Mr. Christie admits that the President has his faults, doesn't listen to others, and is difficult to work with, but most of Christie's criticism in the book is not directed at the President, but more about the lack of ”high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts.”

After Christie was fired from heading the Transition Team, all of the work the team did to identify quality individuals for high positions in the Trump White house was trashed, and the new team, with little time available, failed to bring in quality candidates and provide helpful advice to the President-elect. Instead, as Mr. Christie writes, Trump got “Russian lackey and future federal felon Michael Flynn as national security adviser,” the “greedy and inexperienced Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency,” the “not-ready-for-prime-time Jeff Sessions as attorney general” and “a stranger named Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State."

I listened to the audiobook, and enjoyed Christie's bluntness. Maybe it's because of my NY / NJ roots, but I found Christie convincing in his speaking style. Christie is a "tell it like it is" East Coast politician - brash, but rational. In his previous jobs as a Prosecutor and Governor of New Jersey, he was what's becoming a rarity among politicians today, someone willing to work with the opposing political Party, and someone who doesn't believe that "compromise" is a betrayal or a dirty word.

The book covers a little bit of his life, his entry into politics, an overview of his time as Prosecutor and Governor, and then as a Trump supporter during the Presidential campaign. He was close to Donald Trump for years, well before Trump entered into the political arena, so endorsing Trump for President after his own campaign fell through isn't too hard to understand. He felt his experience could be valuable to Trump, and thought that he could help Trump in his job. Christie may have had a hidden agenda in endorsing Mr. Trump during the campaign, admitting to being interested in either the Vice President or Attorney General spot on the Trump ticket. So by helping his friend Trump, he must have felt he was improving his chances at one of those two spots. However, as he tells later in the book, previous animosity with the family of the President's son-in-law, and also with Presidential Advisor Steve Bannon, undid any advantage of Christie's friendship with Mr. Trump, and no role was offered in the White House.

Like so many other books about the Trump administration, Christie points out that the Trump team was understaffed by experienced political insiders, and some team members didn't serve Candidate Trump very well. Christie didn't told back on his opinion of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Senior Campaign Adviser Steve Bannon. Flynn was described as a loose cannon, a poor choice, and ultimately was fired and convicted of misdeeds. According to Christie and others in the Trump circle of advisers, Bannon was a major leaker of information, much of it false or invented information. Related to that, Christie, like many other Trump loyalists, criticized journalist Bob Woodward's book "FEAR" as containing many inaccuracies. But in this book, Christie doesn't directly blame Woodward for making up false statements. Rather, he ties most of what he considers inaccuracies in Woodward's book as stemming from leaks and distortions coming from Steve Bannon. Christie's criticism of Woodward's book is more that, as an experienced journalist, Woodward should have worked harder to verify information obtained from leakers and liars like Bannon.

Christie also discusses why, in his opinion, he was dismissed from his position on the Trump team as the Transition Team leader, and why he wasn't named as Trump's running mate. The reason was because of Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. Kushner held a grudge against Christie because as Federal Prosecutor, Christie prosecuted Kushner's father, and put him in jail. Kushner, while always civil to Christie during the campaign, apparently never could accept Christie in a leadership role in the Trump Administration. This had been widely reported, and Christie gives good evidence of this in his book.

Overall, I found the book to be quite enjoyable for a political book.… (meer)

I think this is a book where Christie took shots at his enemies (Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn etc) and barely laid a hand on Donald Trump. I think the term I am looking for when he writes about Trump is "disingenuous." I did find it startling that George W. Bush and even Christie's son asked him if he had a role in Bridgegate.

Christie described his failed attempt to win the GOP Presidential nomination in 2016. Though Trump went after Christie (accused Christie about knowing about Bridgegate), Christie never fought back.

If you are a Chris Christie fan, you may enjoy his story. I am somewhat dubious. Christie's high point was managing New Jersey, before, during and after Hurricane Sandy hit the state. I was pleased he praised Barack Obama for his assistance during that time. Christie was sabotaged by John Boehner in getting aid quickly to the state.… (meer)

I am not a supporter of Chris Christie's policies, but I lived in New Jersey during the time that he was governor and I thought he was pretty refreshing, although he could also be incredibly rude. Still, I thought he accomplished some good things. However, his unflagging loyalty to Donald Trump and his failure to hold him accountable for the many horrible things that he's done - instead blaming all of the people around him - seems very disingenuous to me. I thought this book was decent, but there is a little grain of doubt within me that whispers he may not be telling the whole truth sometimes.… (meer)

I enjoyed this book, especially the part about the 2016 Presidential campaign and, his attempts to set up a transition for Donald Trump. I'm just not sure how much to believe.

Consider “Bridgegate.” Christie's in-your-face political style of which he is so proud, and a few other peccadilloes that he failed to discuss, like not reporting all his income on tax forms, made it all the more credible to me that he would have engaged in such a mean trick. He says that he wasn't aware of the traffic problems in what came to be known as “Bridgegate” until he read about it in the Wall Street Journal. And that would have been when? The second day? After it all was over? His vagueness was a red flag to me. He says that complaints were pouring in the first day – so he didn't read about it in the local newspapers, wasn't told about it by his staff, didn't get a call from Mayor Mark Sokolich of Fort Lee? If I were Sokolich, I would have immediately called Christie, as my governor, Patrick Foye as the head of the Port Authority, and Andrew Cuomo, as the other governor involved and the person who appointed Foye. Christie, of course, would say that he never got any calls, but other sources claim that he and his staff pointedly ignored them. Christie argues that shifting the lanes to punish Sokolich would have been ridiculous, since no-one demanded that he endorse Christie as a condition of switching the lanes back. I would have thought that Sokolich would have spoken up if there had been any explicit extortion, but switching the lanes would have made sense if the purpose was to punish Sokolich, or make an example of him. Apparently his staff and appointees were also discussing another mayor who hadn't endorsed him.

One wonders what Foye was doing through all this, why he allowed it to continue. Eventually it turned out that some of Christie's staff and appointees had deliberately shifted the lanes to create problems for Fort Lee. But why? Christie says that they had it in for Sokolich, but we are given no reasons why they would have had a grudge against Sokolich separate from Christie. The best evidence for Christie's innocence is that they didn't blame him at their trials, but who knows what went on behind the scenes.

This segues into Christie's relationship with Donald Trump. If he had known him for so many years, how is he so surprised by how things worked out. Was Trump really a friend, or just a potential donor? He'd certainly had some experiences of Trump's erratic behavior. On a purely personal basis, I certainly would have steered clear of or been wary around, any “friend” who treated me like Trump treated Christie. Christie says that what really destroyed his own presidential campaign is that Trump falsely accused him of being the leader of the “Bridgegate” plot. Christie then immediately endorsed Trump and went to work for his campaign!? He claimed that it was important to beat the “flawed” Hillary Clinton. That might be a tribute to Christie's political shrewdness and partisan loyalty, but not, perhaps, his public spirit. I don't find that a convincing argument when the alternative was the even more flawed Donald Trump, who, at that point, was by no means guaranteed to be the Republican candidate, and who might not have won without the October announcement that the investigation into Clinton's emails was reopened. Maybe Christie thought that even if he was a long shot, Trump was his best shot at advancement into the Federal government. Even afterwords, even after he was summarily fired, he seems to be trying to exempt Trump from responsibility for his dysfunctional White House. Even given that Christie was fired at Jared Kushner's insistence, it's still Trump's responsibility. I at least give Christie credit that when Trump wanted him to accept a nomination for Labor Secretary, he refused because, among other things, he didn't want to go through the process because he can't trust Trump staffers not to be trying to stab him in the back. Trump ignored this. What it Trump had been offering Christie a position that he really wanted? Would he have gone back into the snake pit to try and get it.

I give Christie credit for stepping up to create a transition team, over the objections of Donald Trump. His efforts were literally trashed by a president-elect who believed in winging it. We've sen the results. Christie got what he might have expected – nothing, because Jared Kushner has a grudge against Christie for prosecuting his father, Charles Kushner. Jared kept insisting that it should have been handled by Jewish community or the Kushner family. It doesn't seem to occur to Jared that it's mostly his father's bullying and sense of entitlement that made the family unable to resolve the issues; or maybe even (no!) that he should blame his father for his own bad behavior.

Christie never addresses his falling approval rating – he was one of the most unpopular governors in the history of the United States by the time this was over. Was it just because he spent so much time campaigning, or had he, like a couple of Maryland governors that I could name, become impossibly arrogant?… (meer)