You'd think that by now, Chris Christie would be impervious to insults—that today, as his eight roller-coaster years as New Jersey's governor come to a humbling close, he might be able to let certain things slide. But before I'd even set one foot into his office on a recent afternoon, there was a bone he wanted to pick. Sitting at a long table, Christie waved his iPhone, on which he'd pulled up a 2015 article from GQ’s website, a profile of sorts that probed his famed peevishness. He read the headline to me: “‘What a Dick: The Chris Christie Story.’” Then, the story's subject fixed me in his gaze. “So you can see why I kind of thought that maybe this”—he gestured toward the empty chair waiting for me—“may not be the best thing for me.”
Christie nonetheless motioned for me to sit. It was the end of a long week, at the end of a long summer, which had come on the heels of a long couple of years, and he was in an unusually reflective mood. There were things he wanted to say—about all that he'd been through, all the ways he'd been misunderstood, and all that he hoped still to accomplish—and his wariness soon gave way to candor. Even on the subject of his most recent political wound.
No doubt, you remember the viral pictures from July: Christie lounging on the Jersey Shore, plopped shamelessly on a beach otherwise emptied by a government shutdown. The photos—snapped from a rented airplane—prompted a brutal national roasting. Here was Christie, closing New Jersey's beaches to wage political war, yet basking in the surf himself.
But what if I told you that his decision to spend the Fourth of July weekend on the sands of Island Beach State Park was made with goodness in his heart? Could you be convinced that the whole kerfuffle came about because Christie was trying to ease the suffering of opioid addicts?
Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch. Christie had decided long before the shutdown that he wasn't altering his planned trip to the beach—and he's not about to apologize for it now. “If there was a 25-year-old blonde in that beach chair next to me, then you got a story,” Christie said. “But my wife of 31 years and all my kids?! I never thought it was that big a deal.”
But what people overlooked, he went on, is that his decision to engage in the political brinkmanship that led to the closing of the state government—the thing that made his presence on the beach that day so objectionable—was downright noble. “The shutdown,” as he recounted for me, “was about opioids.”
For much of his governorship, Christie had been admirably proactive in (and progressive about) addressing the drug scourge—bucking his fellow Republicans to expand Medicaid, which made drug treatment more available to poor people in New Jersey; pushing for more drug courts, which steer nonviolent offenders toward treatment instead of prison; even signing a “Good Samaritan” law that provides immunity from arrest for people who call 911 if they’re with someone who overdoses. But now, in his final year in office, Christie had made the opioid problem an even greater priority—his top one, in fact.
The centerpiece of the effort was to be $300 million in new funding for addiction treatment, the financing of which led to a showdown with state legislators and the resulting mid-summer shutdown. In classic bare-knuckled Christie fashion, he had hoped to use the shutdown to embarrass his rival, Vinnie Prieto, the Democratic Speaker of the General Assembly, by hanging 500 posters on shuttered government offices across the state that featured Prieto’s picture and read: “This facility is closed because of this man.” But whatever leverage Christie thought he had went out the window when his own photos, those of his beach vacation, emerged. Three days into the shutdown, Christie agreed to a budget deal that, crucially, did not include his $300 million for opioids.
Nonetheless, that hasn't stopped him from spinning the budget deal as a victory—boasting to me about how he'd brought to heel the state's largest health insurer, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, from which he'd hoped to extract his cash. “We wound up getting a bunch of reforms,” he said. I reminded him that he didn't get the money for opioids. “I'll get what I want, don't worry,” he told me. “I know I will.”
And yet Christie's trademark bluster was belied by his surroundings. It was a Friday afternoon, and Trenton—decades removed from those bustling days when the city, as the famous slogan puts it, did the making and the world did the taking—was even sleepier than usual. The legislature was out of session, and since the historical State House building, which was built when George Washington was president, was undergoing extensive renovations, Christie was working out of a temporary space in a drab, ahistoric state office building, where he'll stay until his term ends in January. He'd decorated it with photos and reminders of his favorite things—Springsteen, Reagan, the Mets—but he couldn't deny that it lacked the grandeur of his old digs. “You know, you sit in the space where Woodrow Wilson sat,” he mused. Unmentioned by the governor, of course, was that he once envisioned himself sitting in another, loftier office held by Wilson. If a man of Christie's size can seem small, he suddenly did.
But while Christie may have been diminished, he was not necessarily defeated. In the issue of opioids, he seemed to have found a new, and most likely final, purpose as a public official—his last, best shot to do something big and good, something that could fulfill the outsize ambitions that so many people, not least among them Chris Christie, had placed in him. Not only was he working on fighting opioids in New Jersey; he was also chairing a presidential commission for Donald Trump to develop a national strategy on the issue. “This opioid issue, to me, is the single most important issue that I have left to deal with,” Christie told me.
I asked him how he planned to get the $300 million for his New Jersey efforts. “Stay tuned,” Christie said. “I'm not gonna tell you now. Stay tuned.” He sat up straighter in his chair and, summoning his old swagger, went on. “We will spend and invest a significant amount of money, very close to what I was asking for, if not exactly what I was asking for, on this issue, because it is non-negotiable to me,” Christie said. “If I don't get it from Horizon, I'll get it from someplace else, and when you're governor, in this state, you have the ability to get that done.” It wasn't clear if he was trying to convince himself or me.
A few weeks later, it didn't matter. He announced that he was going to spend $200 million on opioid treatment—a significant sum, no doubt, but still only two-thirds of what he'd originally wanted.
These are the final days of Chris Christie, who has experienced the most vertiginous rise and precipitous fall of any American politician this century. Although he's loath to second-guess past actions and decisions, much less admit to mistakes—“He always used to say that one of the first rules of leadership is to tear off the rearview mirror, because you can't change what happened,” says one Christie confidant—he has a difficult time resisting nostalgia.
Showing me around his temporary digs, his tie loosened and his suit jacket draped over the back of a chair, Christie relived his glory days. “That was when Obama came during '13 to the one-year anniversary [of Superstorm Sandy],” Christie said, pointing to a picture of himself and the former president. It was on that occasion—a year after the two rivals made headlines for being chummy—that Christie bested Obama in a boardwalk football toss. “That was really good,” Christie went on. “I've spoken to the former president a few times, and whenever I do, I get a chance to lord it over him.”
Though he came to the governor's office eight years ago as a relative nobody—eking out an unimpressive victory against a feeble opponent—Christie was a gust of fresh political air and almost instantly became a star. He filled the position in such an unexpected and exceptional manner—battling public employees' unions one moment and Islamophobes the next—that Republican heavyweights like Henry Kissinger were soon begging him to run for the White House against Barack Obama. Christie demurred, saying that he didn't think he was ready yet to be president, but there was no doubt that, with a little more time, he'd come to a different conclusion. He steered his state through the trauma of Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and a year later was re-elected with an unheard-of 60 percent of the vote. On magazine covers and in smoke-filled back rooms, it was a foregone conclusion that he'd be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016.
Then came Bridgegate, the scandal that resulted from his allies' efforts to punish a New Jersey mayor who didn't endorse his re-election campaign by blocking traffic on the George Washington Bridge. Although two of those allies would ultimately be given prison sentences—they're currently appealing their convictions—Christie pleaded ignorance (and innocence) and clawed back enough to run for the White House in 2016. That's when he became roadkill to Donald Trump.
Of course, Christie was hardly alone in getting steamrolled by Trump, who bested 15 other Republicans, not to mention Hillary Clinton, on his way to the White House. But Christie's defeat was particularly humbling, since it involved Trump doing to him what Christie was accustomed to doing to others. Christie's rise, after all, had been fueled by his bullying and belittling of friends and foes alike—telling a protester at a press conference to “sit down and shut up” or his constituents to “get the hell off the beach” during a hurricane. In many ways, Christie seemed perfectly matched to the political moment of 2016: a no-holds-barred truth-teller who wasn't afraid to offend people's delicate sensibilities.
It's just that Trump did him one better. Christie might have scored points against Marco Rubio during a debate by ridiculing him for his “memorized 30-second speech,” but it was Trump who indelibly—and offensively—branded the Florida senator as Liddle Marco…and Jeb Bush as Low-Energy Jeb…and Ted Cruz as Lyin' Ted. Christie was like a drive-time deejay trying to compete with Howard Stern.
“He was a force of nature at a political time when people wanted to hear the way he was saying things,” Christie now says of Trump. “There's a marked difference between the way we approach these things, no doubt. But I think it made me look less candid.” He adds, almost plaintively: “Donald Trump ran the race in terms of the outspoken, tell-it-like-it-is guy. That was my lane.”
Even worse for Christie, once he ended his presidential campaign, his humiliations at Trump's hands continued. Unlike most of the candidates whom Trump had vanquished, Christie, upon exiting the race, almost immediately endorsed him. It seemed an odd move. Not only had Trump once alleged that Christie “totally knew about” Bridgegate—a charge that Christie particularly resents; Christie had attacked Trump as “an entertainer” and unserious. What's more, Christie had fashioned himself as a different kind of Republican, one who could appeal to non-white voters. (In his 2013 re-election, Christie won 51 percent of Latino voters and 21 percent of African-Americans.) It was hard to see how he could support someone who'd accused Mexico of sending “rapists” to the U.S. and only reluctantly disavowed the support of David Duke.
It was even stranger to see Christie so slavishly playing second fiddle—appearing behind Trump at rallies while Trump prattled on, wearing what CNN called a “hostage face”—especially when Trump didn't stop needling Christie. In one instance, Trump appeared to make fun of Christie's weight, telling him that he could no longer eat Oreos; in another, Trump held an umbrella above his own head while Christie, standing right next to him, got wet in the rain. And yet Christie continued to stand, mutely, by Trump's side. “I'd never seen him be so deferential,” Tom Kean, a former New Jersey governor and Christie's political mentor, says. “But it's a normal reaction to be deferential to someone you wanted a job from.”
But the job never came. First, Trump picked Mike Pence over Christie for his running mate. Then, after Trump won in November, he chose Jeff Sessions over Christie for attorney general. Adding insult to injury, Trump fired Christie as the chairman of his transition team—the consolation prize Christie had been given when he was passed over in the veepstakes.
Christie insists that he and Trump have no problems with each other—that, in fact, they've been friends for years—and it's obviously important to him that people know he views himself and the businessman turned president as peers. Christie's former law partner and longtime political consigliere, Bill Palatucci, emphasizes that when Trump and Christie first met in 2002, Christie said hello as a favor to Trump's sister, a federal judge whose jurisdiction includes New Jersey. “I think it's crucial to understanding the relationship,” Palatucci says. “To meet Trump on such a level playing field means a lot, and they've always seen themselves as equals.” Christie says of Trump: “He gets mad at me at times, he yells at me at times, but he respects me.” Christie adds that he often yells back at Trump, although “less now that he's president.”
Indeed, it's conventional wisdom among political insiders that Christie's problem isn't so much with Trump as it is with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose father Christie sent to prison when Christie was a federal prosecutor. Even on that score, Christie downplays any friction. “There's a lot of history there, not between me and him but between me and his father,” Christie says, “and Jared has continued to tell me that he holds no grudge against me, so I have to take him at his word.” As for who has torpedoed him repeatedly in TrumpWorld, Christie is as philosophical as he is fatalistic. “When you're as prominent a person as I've been, there's more than one person shooting at you all the time,” he says. “So unless you see it, you don't necessarily know which bullet hit you.”
It’s an attitude he’s trying to get others who are close to him to adopt—like his four children who, Christie says, haven’t responded as philosophically as he has to his recent setbacks. “They were really angry,” Christie told me. “And I just said to all of them, it’s like the old Hyman Roth line from The Godfather. ‘This is the business we have chosen.’ And it’s not fair, but you’ve gotta understand that in life sometimes unfair things happen.” He paused, as if to indulge in a little more self-reflection. “The bridge situation wasn’t fair to me, but, you know, things happen and you have to live with some of life’s unfairness.”
The job that Christie did ultimately get, chairing the Trump-created President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioids Crisis, has been dismissed by some as the ultimate booby prize. But Christie actually jumped at the opportunity. Indeed, according to one Trump adviser, Christie, after not getting the attorney-general assignment, ultimately passed on several other possible posts in the Trump administration—including secretary of commerce and secretary of veterans affairs, as well as ambassadorships to Italy and the Vatican. (Christie denies being offered the positions with the departments of Commerce and Veterans Affairs.) “Trump asked Jared, Reince, and Bannon to find him a job,” says the Trump adviser. “But Christie didn't want to give up being governor for what they were offering.”
Working on the opioids issue is something Christie has been interested in for years, and not only because it allowed him to keep his day job. More than two decades ago, as a newly elected New Jersey county freeholder, Christie launched a successful push to get the local government to pay for inpatient drug treatment for adolescents who couldn't afford it. “We were the first county in the state to do that,” he boasts.
A decade later, the issue became even more personal when one of his best friends from law school—who was by then a successful attorney—developed a Percocet addiction. Christie and other friends were enlisted to stage an intervention, and for the next eight years—through the man's divorce, his trips to rehab and then his relapses, the loss of his law license and his home—Christie was part of his support system. In early 2014, the man called Christie to check in. “He said he was doing really well and he wanted to show me how well, and ‘Let's go out to dinner,’ ” Christie recalls. The night they agreed to meet, the man stood Christie up. Three weeks later, Christie got the call he knew was coming: His friend had been found dead in a motel room, an empty bottle of Percocet and a drained quart of vodka on the nightstand. “His death,” Christie says, “was one of the more traumatic moments of my life.”
Christie's presidential campaign revealed to him just how widespread the opioid problem was. On his first visit to New Hampshire as a candidate, he stopped for lunch at a pizza place in Manchester. The owner told him that one of his employees had overdosed in the bathroom the day before. He learned from one of the women who did his makeup before his appearances on cable shows that she was a recovering addict. And he heard, at countless town halls, from those impacted by addiction. “I was confronted with a real sense of despair,” Christie says.
Now that he's tackling the issue for the administration of the man who described New Hampshire as a “drug-infested den”—“That wouldn't be my characterization,” Christie says—he's faced a couple of formidable challenges. For one, there was Tom Price, who until he resigned in September was the head of Trump's Department of Health and Human Services and who’d voiced skepticism about medication-assisted treatments like methadone and offered support for “faith-based” approaches. And there’s still Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general and former Alabama Senator who has vowed to fight a new drug war by pushing the harshest sentences possible for even low-level drug offenders. “There are aspects of the administration who still believe this is an enforcement issue,” Christie concedes. And while he's reluctant to mention Sessions by name, it's clear that's who Christie's talking about when he says, “I do think that my emphasis based upon eight years as a governor, dealing with this on the ground, is different from the perspective you get as a United States senator.”
More than Sessions, though, there's the challenge of Trump—since the commission can only be as effective as the president lets it be. Of course, Christie's opioids commission has been one of the only Trump-administration policy initiatives to be run with a semblance of normalcy. It has held meetings featuring the testimony of well-respected experts and has solicited comments from the general public, as well. Although the commission was about a month late in submitting its interim report on July 31, the document itself was hailed for policy recommendations that accurately reflected the medical and public-health consensus on the issue.
But Trump's response to the report has been as abnormal and incompetent as everything else in his administration. Christie actually tailored the report to his boss's needs, taking the commission staff's initial draft and personally editing it down to a third of its original length. “I remember when I was doing debate prep with [Trump in the general election] and people would come in with binders that were like five or six inches thick, and I'd look at them and say, ‘That's going to be the most exquisite coaster at Mar-a-Lago,’ because he's not going to read all that stuff,” Christie told me. “That's not the way he takes in information. He's much more of a, give him a short bit of writing and then verbally talk to him. And that's what we did on the report.... I wrote the report for him. It's not like a white paper that is 80 pages that he wouldn't look at. I knew who my audience was.”
The report's “first and most urgent recommendation” was that Trump declare the opioid epidemic a “national emergency.” Trump initially seemed to reject this advice in favor of the views of Price, who on August 8, after a meeting devoted to the opioid-commission report, emerged to tell reporters that the president had concluded that the opioid crisis could be addressed “without the declaration of a national emergency.” But then two days later, Trump responded to a reporter's question after a national-security briefing at his golf club in New Jersey by declaring, “The opioid crisis is an emergency. And I'm saying officially right now, it is an emergency. It's a national emergency.” Christie told me that Trump had called him in advance to tell him he'd be making the declaration. “He wasn't ad-libbing at all,” Christie says. But Trump apparently didn't give a heads-up to the rest of his staff, because more than a month after the declaration, his administration has not followed up with any policy changes. If and when it will remains unclear—even to Christie. “I think the president is probably 90 percent of the way with me,” he says.
Ever since he was elected governor, Christie had made it something of a tradition on Memorial and Labor Day weekends to visit boardwalks on the Jersey Shore. There he'd eat ice cream and pose for selfies. On the Memorial Day weekend after Sandy, when the Shore was reopening for business, he was greeted like Charles de Gaulle during the liberation of Paris. But this past Labor Day, Christie skipped a boardwalk excursion. It could have been a routine scheduling conflict, but Christie also has good reason to want to avoid big crowds.
The truth is, the crowds haven't been very friendly to him lately. On Memorial Day last year, beachgoers along the Asbury Park boardwalk jeered him as “a fucking disgrace” for supporting Trump. At a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game in July, a heckler goaded a nachos-toting Christie into a confrontation that, filmed by another fan's phone, went viral. And at a New York Mets game later that month, when Christie's image appeared on the JumboTron after he'd caught a foul ball, he was serenaded with boos. Christie tries to brush off these encounters as unrepresentative. “I will tell you that I took hundreds of pictures in Milwaukee over a three-day weekend of people who came up and said, ‘We love you. Can I please have a picture? We think you're doing a great job,’ ” he says. “The overwhelming majority of people that I interact with are like that.” But whereas Christie seemingly used to relish confrontations, they now appear to take a toll. “When I sat back down,” he says of the testy incident in Milwaukee, “it ruined the rest of the game for me.” He adds, “I'm a public servant, not a public punching bag.”
And so perhaps that's why the closest Christie came to a public event at the Shore this past Labor Day weekend was the Wednesday before, when he appeared at a rest stop along the Garden State Parkway, just past the exit for Asbury Park. Standing behind a podium in a far corner of the parking lot—which was hardly scenic but admittedly beat the men's room or the Nathan's counter—Christie announced a plan to renovate all of the rest stops along the parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike. “People who travel on both these roads, the turnpike and the parkway, will stop at places like this to get gas, they'll stop to get something to eat, they'll stop to use the facilities. And for a lot of these folks, their first impression of our state—if this is their first visit—is a rest stop on the turnpike or the parkway,” Christie said, summoning more enthusiasm than the moment seemed to warrant.
It was a far cry from the White House, or even his glory days in Trenton, which may be why Christie seemed so alone. It's typical for staff to leave lame-duck governors, but Christie has experienced an unusually heavy exodus. Some exits were prompted by Bridgegate. Others left because of Christie's endorsement of Trump. Maria Comella, his longtime communications director—“my alter ego,” Christie called her—went so far as to back Clinton during the presidential campaign, without giving Christie so much as a warning. “I was literally in Trump Tower,” Christie recalls. “Paul Manafort comes up to me and says, ‘Your communications director just endorsed Hillary Clinton?’ ” Comella now works for Andrew Cuomo.
And New Jersey Republicans, who once jockeyed to align themselves with Christie, now keep their distance. His atrocious poll numbers will almost certainly deliver the governor's office to the Democratic candidate, Phil Murphy, in November. When I asked Murphy's campaign strategist, Steve DeMicco, how much of a factor Christie was in Murphy's giant lead in the polls over his Republican opponent, Christie's lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, he replied, “One hundred percent.”
Christie hasn't yet decided what he'll do once he leaves office. He flirted with a sports-talk-radio gig and even auditioned to replace Mike Francesca on New York's WFAN, but both he and the station decided to abandon the experiment. He'll likely join a law firm or an investment firm and make some serious money. It's a good bet he'll sign a contributor contract with CNN or MSNBC. He doesn't deny that he might at some point do more work for Trump, if Trump asks him, and he remains steadfast in his defense of the president. About Trump's “both sides” rhetoric after the violence in Charlottesville, Christie told me, “I know he's not a racist. He just blew it.” When I asked Christie how Trump kept blowing it if he's not a racist—repeatedly failing to criticize neo-Nazis and white supremacists—he deflected: “Don't confuse that with stubbornness. The president has a stubborn streak.”
So, of course, does Christie, but he swears he's done with elected office. “I don't see myself running for office again, because I've had the one job that I really wanted, that's governor, and I ran for the other job that I really wanted, which was president,” Christie told me.
For eight years, Christie has been a political force. Now that force seems exhausted. As the shadows grew longer that afternoon in his office, he confronted his more limited horizons. A guy once ridiculed for spending so much time away from New Jersey pursuing his national political ambitions, he now seems content to stay there—even if he does go the cable news and Wall Street route. “I'm not a Manhattan kind of guy,” Christie said. “I think we'd be much more comfortable buying a house at the Jersey Shore.”
Jason Zengerle is GQ’s political correspondent.
This story originally appeared in the November 2017 issue.
