Watching Brett Baier’s hostile interview with Trump on Fox (below), Tom Nichols came to the conclusion that Señor T is afraid, very afraid. It was more than Trump just being jittery and combative and answering questions as if they’re accusations. That’s his style. “Typically,” noted Nichols, “when confronted with more serious challenges, he deploys his peculiar political glossolalia, verbal fusillades formed out of names and places and phrases plucked from jumbled memories, old talking points, and barely remembered briefings. But something was different this time. Trump seemed not himself— or at least not the character he’s been presenting to the public for most of his life. Instead, he seemed deeply uneasy in an environment where he should have felt at home. The hosts of Fox News have been, for the most part, staunch supporters of the 45th president, repeating Trump’s many grievances and echoing his lies about how the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. Fox, after all, is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a ‘hostile’ network.”
Trump was right. Corporate Fox is hostile towards him and a nothing shill like Brett Baier knows exactly who he’s working for. His line of questions kept Trump off-balance and verging on incoherent throughout. “Trump’s discomfort,” wrote Nichols, “had a lot to do with Baier. One-on-one interviews are hard for Trump, because they require him to focus on individual human beings and engage with them as if he cares about— or even heard— what they just said. He always runs the risk that the other person might continue to ask pointed questions even after he has wandered into some incomprehensible reverie. Perhaps Trump was expecting a Fox anchor to cut him a break in such an arrangement; instead, Baier came prepared, and pushed back— with data— on many of Trump’s claims. Given how extreme so many of Trump’s no-one-ever-did-anything-better-than-me statements tend to be, pushing back might not seem so difficult, but credit where it is due: Baier interrupted Trump, corrected him, and challenged him on multiple fronts, including his election lies, his indictments, his record as president, his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, and even his predilection for silly nicknames… Trump clearly hated the whole experience this time, and he retreated to his comfort zone, dismissing facts, insulting the people who once worked for him, belittling Fox’s ratings, and accusing the network of bias against him… [P]erhaps he was more than flustered; perhaps his trip to a federal courtroom in Miami has finally induced a fear that he could face real consequences for his actions. His former chief of staff John Kelly thinks so, saying recently that he believes Trump is ‘scared shitless.’ That would explain a lot about Trump’s defensiveness during the Fox interview.”
He’s afraid of sharks. And the sharks are circling. He struck back at Barr just as Chris Christie took another bite at out him. And there’s no doubt which side the media is on. Chis Christie, wrote Frank Bruni, is doing something very, very important, as Charlie Sykes cheered. Bruni certainly knows what he’s dealing with in Christie, who, he wrote “made a complete fool of himself back in 2016, fan-dancing obsequiously around Donald Trump, angling for a crucial role in his administration, nattering on about their friendship, pretending or possibly even convincing himself that Trump could restrain his ego, check his nastiness, suspend his grift and, well, serve America… It’s all water under the George Washington Bridge now.” I guess everyone wants to forget his role and Barr’s role, huh? (Not Noah) Bruni think’s he’s “magnificent.” The role he’s playing in the GOP primary “couldn’t be more emotionally gratifying to behold. He’s telling the unvarnished truth about Trump, and he’s the only candidate doing that. A former prosecutor, he’s artfully, aggressively and comprehensively making the case against Trump, knocking down all the rationalizations Trump has mustered and all the diversions he has contrived since his 37-count federal indictment. None of the other candidates comes close. They’ve for the most part gagged themselves or decided to play laughable word games about who Trump is, what he has done and what he may yet do. It’s as if they’re looking at this wild and repugnant hyena, it has democracy in its jaws, and they know they should call it what it is and acknowledge what it’s poised to devour, but they’ve decided that merely hinting at that is candor and courage enough.”
My enchantment with Christie’s fireworks makes me a cliché. In an observant and witty analysis in The Atlantic on Monday with the headline “Chris Christie, Liberal Hero,” David Graham inventoried the adoring media coverage Christie has garnered, noting that while there’s zero evidence that Christie could actually win the contest he has entered, “pundits are swooning.”
But the swoon isn’t about Christie’s prospects. It’s about the hugely valuable contrast to other Republican presidential candidates that he’s providing. And about this: The health of American democracy hinges on a reckoning within the Republican Party, and that won’t come from Democrats saying the kinds of things that Christie is now. They’ve been doing that for years. It’ll come— if it even can— from the words and warnings of longtime Republicans who know how to get and use the spotlight.
Did you see Christie’s CNN town hall last week? Have you watched or listened to any of his interviews? He’s funny. He’s lively. He’s crisp. And he’s right. Over the past few weeks, he has described Trump’s behavior as “vanity run amok.” Trump himself is “a petulant child.”
At the town hall: “He is voluntarily putting our country through this. If at any point before the search in August of ’22 he had just done what anyone, I suspect, in this audience would have done, which is said, ‘All right, you’re serious? You’re serving a grand jury subpoena? Let me just give the documents back,’ he wouldn’t have been charged. Wouldn’t have been charged with anything even though he had kept them for almost a year and a half.”
… To the conundrum of what, if Christie qualifies for the Republican primary debates, he’ll do about the required pledge that he support whoever winds up getting the party’s nomination, he has apparently found a solution that’s suited to Republicans’ willful and nihilistic captivity to Trump, the stupidity of the pledge and the stakes of the race: He’ll sign what he must and later act as he pleases.
“I will do what I need to do to be up on that stage to try to save my party and save my country,” he told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning.
That’s good. I wonder if it means Mr. Magnificent will continue campaigning against Trump right up until the November Election Day. What about Pence? Hutchinson? I doubt it. “Chris Christie, superhero?” asked Bruni. “He has his own supersize vanity. He is arguably playing the only part in the crowded primary field available to him. And those dynamics may have as much to do with his assault on Trump as moral indignation does. Even so, saving his party and country agrees with him.”
Here’s the first Christie ad. It’s running in New Hampshire now, where polls show Christie surging into third place and threatening Meatball Ron’s position as #2.
I thought billionaire Mets owner, hedge fund crook and long-time Christie ally Steve Cohen was going to fund Christie’s campaign against Trump. Apparently he changed his mind of it was fake news, though other very rich Republicans are stepping up to the plate. Christie says he needs $100 million— and that ain’t gonna happen.
Without Cohen’s support, Christie, who has formed relationships with many sections of corporate America since his days as governor of the Garden State, has turned to other wealthy donors to help finance his campaign for president.
RXR Realty CEO Scott Rechler, Motorola Solutions CEO Greg Brown, veteran lobbyist David Tamasi, former Trump U.S. ambassador to Italy and hedge fund co-founder Lewis Eisneberg, and former Northern Virginia Technology Council CEO Bobbie Kilberg have given money to support Christie this time, according to people familiar with the matter. Kilberg was also an advisor to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
Many of the financiers fundraising for Christie’s campaign, including Kilberg and her husband, Bill Kilberg, who is a partner at legal juggernaut Gibson Dunn, have done so because they believe he is the only GOP candidate willing to directly take on Trump.
“My husband Bill and I both are supporting Chris Christie, have already been raising funds for him and will continue to do so,” Kilberg said. “Our first focus is to help recruit 40,000 individual donors at any dollar amount in order to secure Chris a spot on the RNC debate stage. Then, in late September we will host a major fundraiser for him at our home. Why are we backing Chris? Because he is directly and forcefully taking on Trump’s candidacy as a threat to the rule of law and the future of our democracy.”
…Wall Street executives who are inclined to help Christie are following the same anti-Trump model as the Kilbergs and other executives from various industries
“At the moment what’s occurring is all of the donors that want blood, that want somebody to take shots at Trump, are now starting to coalesce around Christie and that’s most of the Wall Street crowd because they hate this guy,” a veteran GOP fundraiser told CNBC.
A senior banking executive involved with Republican politics told CNBC that there has been a “helplessness” in the finance world about the expectation that Trump is on course to win the GOP primary again, but Christie gives them hope that a rival can at least wound him in the early stages of the 2024 election.
“There feels like a helplessness, and Christie gives them hope of being the only candidate who can punch the crap out of him but may not necessarily win,” this banking executive said.
Part 1 of the Fox interview:
And part 2: