There was more to the purge of Chris Christie and his allies from the Trump transition team than was apparent on the surface. And it wasn’t just because Christie put the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in jail. There were actually sound, presidential reasons for removing Christie, despite his early support for Trump.
From Alex Isenstadt, Inside Chris Christie’s fall from grace – POLITICO:
In the days following the election, Trump expressed deep frustration about how Christie was handling the transition. In particular, he vented about how the governor had loaded up the team with lobbyists, the very class of people Trump had campaigned against, with his calls to “drain the swamp” in Washington. The president-elect also noticed that Christie had stocked his team with old New Jersey friends and allies.
There were other issues. Once the dust settled from their surprise win, the Trump team noticed that Christie had done little to vet potential administration picks or to dig into potential conflicts of interests. With Democrats eager to pounce on any early mistake, it was an oversight they simply couldn’t afford.
By Thursday of last week, Trump was telling aides that he was ready to make a change. . . .
Early on, Paul Manafort, Trump’s then-campaign chairman, urged the governor to get Trump’s children and his influential son-in-law, Jared Kushner, invested in the hires he was making. It was advice Christie didn’t seem to take.
In the months to come, Kushner, a 35-year-old New York City real estate mogul who grew up in New Jersey, would become a bigger problem for Christie, arguing forcefully against Trump making the governor his running mate. Christie, a former U.S. attorney, became convinced that Kushner was retaliating over his 2004 prosecution of Kushner’s father, Charles.
Still, while they never became close, Kushner and Christie agreed to work together. At several points, according to two sources, Trump took steps to forge a warmer relationship between them — apparently without success.
Kushner’s allies say the idea that he’s out for personal vengeance, promoted in several recent stories, is simplistic and overblown. Rather, they argue, the Trump son-in-law has more substantive concerns — viewing the governor as badly damaged following the Bridgegate affair. And in the days following the election, Kushner told others in Trump Tower that Christie oversaw a messy, lobbyist-filled transition operation that simply needed to be cleaned up.
Over the last week, a number of Christie hires have been replaced. In an indication of just how intense the backlash to Christie has been within the campaign, some New Jersey Republicans have been dissuaded from applying for administration jobs out of fear that they’ll be seen as close to the governor.
And yet, Trump received Christie at his golf course this weekend, so there is now speculation that he might be restored to favor at some level.
But it’s a good sign that Trump yanked him from the transition team for trying to populate the executive branch with lobbyists (against Trump’s own pledge) and Christie cronies.
Photo by Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
