Kamikaze Chris Christie could yet rattle Donald Trump

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie speaks during a New Hampshire Town Hall. Picture: AFP.

Mike Pence turned 64 on Wednesday. He chose not to mark the passage into the phase of life famously captured by Lennon and McCartney by being handy for Mrs Pence, mending a fuse or digging the weeds. Instead he spent his birthday doing what a large number of ageing American men do these days: he announced his intention to run for president of the United States.

“Different times call for different leadership,” he said in his launch video and later at his inaugural rally in Iowa, where the first votes in the Republican primary campaign will be cast next February.

If it sounds like computer-generated platitudinous boilerplate, it isn’t. The former vice-president is striving to pull off one of the most implausible tricks in political history and everything he says is couched in a rhetorical code he hopes will unlock a path to the White House. Like a man in a hostage video, blinking out a message to concerned relatives, he is trying to send an encrypted signal to Republican voters: he is both pro-Trump and anti-Trump; revolutionary but law-abiding; Maga to his core, but with a heart fired by evangelical purity.

Mike Pence speaks during a campaign event in Waukee, Iowa. Picture; AFP.

The aim is to associate himself in the minds of party faithful with what they see as the blessings of the Trump years – economic prosperity, a rollback of progressive cultural hegemony, control over the porous border, America First at home and abroad – while distancing himself from their excesses. He was Trump’s number two for four years, a clogged artery’s heartbeat away from the presidency, and he believes that ought to give him a claim to the top job.

Yet, as the whole world knows, Pence’s real-life go-round on The Apprentice didn’t end well. In fact it is almost impossible to conjure a scenario in which it could have ended worse. We’ve all had challenging bosses, but how many of us have had to deal with a workplace in which the gaffer stands approvingly by as a braying mob of wild-eyed fanatics calls for us to be publicly hanged?

You’d think his near-death moment on January 6, 2021 might have marked the ignominious end of his long, excruciating effort to accommodate Trump’s licentious, undisciplined, grab ‘em-by-the-pussy style to his own buttoned-up, grace-saying, Bible-quoting mien. Playing the loyal retainer to a porn star-bedding superior cannot have come easily to a man who once declared he would never dine alone with a woman other than his wife.

Donald Trump speaks during a Make America Great Again rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. Picture: AFP.

But ambition is a cruel mistress and one of her demands is ritual displays of abject self-abasement, and so Pence has spent the past two and a half years tiptoeing around the inconvenient fact that the president incited a mob that wanted to kill him.

It is now clear he has finally decided he needs to address the problem a little more directly. In his launch event he hit Trump harder than before over his behaviour on that day and in the larger post-election contest. “We need a leader who appeals to the better angels of our nature,” he said.

The balancing act seems destined to fail, however. Not only do most Republican voters refuse to countenance condemnation of Trump (hence Pence’s previous circumlocutions), but the premise of the Pence case is fundamentally flawed. The whole idea that there is a perfect candidate somewhere who is some idealised version of Trump without the flaws is faith-based political thinking. Given a choice between Trump policies without Trump and Trump without Trump policies, it wouldn’t be close. To most Republicans Pence is not so much the cork without the fizz, as someone once said of a similar milquetoast candidate. He is more like the silence you hear when you open a bottle of still water.

Mike Waltz, a former army officer who sits in Congress as a Republican for the old seat of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is still Trump’s most plausible challenger, captured the core Republican voter’s view when I asked him this week why he had already endorsed Trump for president: “Do you get SpaceX without Elon Musk? Do you get Apple without Steve Jobs? Do you get those policies (you want) without a true disrupter? That’s Donald Trump.”

Trump supporters before a campaign event for presidential hopeful Ron DeSanti in New Hampshire. Picture: AFP.

Another candidate who jumped into the race this week, Chris Christie, the famously combative former governor of New Jersey who ran for the Republican nomination in 2016, also took aim at the former president. Christie has been on an odyssey of his own. He dropped out of the race that year and endorsed Trump, who rewarded him with an advisory role in his campaign but no real job in his administration. Christie subsequently turned tail again and is now the former president’s most vocal critic within his own party.

Christie seems to have decided his role is to take down Trump if he can. At his launch on Tuesday evening in New Hampshire he went for the jugular. “I am going to be very clear. I’m going out there to take out Donald Trump. But here’s why: I want to win, and I don’t want him to win. There is one lane in the Republican nomination, and he’s in front of it. And if you want to win, you better go right through him.”

It’s a kamikaze mission and Christie knows it. With the Republican field expanding by the week – there are now at least nine official candidates and probably more to come – the anti-Trump vote is split and Trump needs a smaller and smaller share of the votes in primary states to secure the nomination.

But some kamikaze pilots at least managed to hit their target. Long shot though it may be, the mission has a better chance than the approach the other candidates are taking – of merely hoping that somehow Trump will just fade away.

The Times