# Chris Christie Governor of New Jersey 2010–18 (b. 1962), U.S. Attorney for New Jersey before that (2002–08), presidential candidate in 2016 and 2024, and the Republican whose career is the vault's cleanest demonstration of two rules: that bipartisan disaster cooperation carries a price, and that a Trump endorsement is a loan, not a gift. ## The hug In the last week of the 2012 campaign, with [[Hurricane Sandy]] having wrecked the Jersey Shore, Christie toured the damage with [[Barack Obama]], praised him without qualification, and was photographed in what the party's base called "the hug." Obama won the following Tuesday; Christie's national standing with Republican primary voters never recovered, and the episode became the cautionary tale every Republican governor since has learned — that working visibly with a Democratic president in an emergency is a career cost. The vault's disaster-politics pages treat it as the founding case. ## Bridgegate and 2016 The September 2013 closure of George Washington Bridge access lanes to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee — "time for some traffic problems" — put two of Christie's aides in federal prison until the Supreme Court unanimously threw out the convictions in 2020 as not fitting the fraud statute; Christie himself was never charged, but the scandal ended him as the establishment's 2016 frontrunner. He ran anyway, quit after New Hampshire, and on February 26, 2016 became the first major elected Republican to endorse [[Donald Trump]] — the moment the party's officeholders began to follow the voters. His reward was the transition chairmanship, from which he was fired days after the election, on the account of everyone involved at the instigation of [[Jared Kushner]], whose father Christie had prosecuted and imprisoned in 2005. He spent the first term as an outside adviser, contracted COVID at the White House in September 2020, and prepared Trump for the debates. ## 2024 Christie ran the most directly anti-Trump campaign of the 2024 primary — "a dictator, a bully" who "will sell the soul of this country" — got almost no votes, and withdrew before New Hampshire in January 2024 with a hot-mic prediction that Nikki Haley would "get smoked." He has since been a television commentator and one of the few Republicans of his generation with nothing left to lose by saying what the others say privately. The [[Republican Party]] page's account of how the 2016 endorsement cascade worked starts with him. ## See Also - [[Hurricane Sandy]] · [[Barack Obama]] · [[Donald Trump]] · [[Jared Kushner]] · [[Republican Party]]