Chris Christie Endorses Donald Trump and Calls Marco Rubio ‘D…Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who dropped out of the presidential race earlier this month, endorsed Donald J. Trump for president on Friday. Updated, …
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Chris Christie Endorses Donald Trump and Calls Marco Rubio ‘Desperate’
Gov. Christie Endorses Donald Trump
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who
dropped out of the presidential race earlier this month, endorsed Donald
J. Trump for president on Friday.
By REUTERS on Publish Date February 26, 2016.
Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images.
Updated, 6:13 p.m. | In
a rollicking day of spectacle, spite and scorn, Gov. Chris Christie of
New Jersey declared his allegiance to Donald J. Trump and war on Senator
Marco Rubio, describing him Friday as desperate and unfit for the
presidency.
The sudden endorsement
interrupted an emboldened, 48-hour assault from Mr. Rubio, who is
adopting many of the real estate mogul’s crude tactics and colorful
insults as he urgently tries to arrest Mr. Trump’s march to the
Republican nomination.
In the span of a few
hours across the state of Texas, Mr. Rubio suggested that Mr. Trump had
urinated in his trousers and used illegal immigrants to tap out his
unceasing Twitter messages. Mr. Trump countered by suggesting that Mr.
Rubio’s excessive perspiration has no place in the White House and
dramatically brandished a water bottle to mock the senator’s chronic
thirst.
Waving the bottle
across a stage, pouring out half its contents onto the podium onto the
floor and then taking giant gulps from it, Mr. Trump ridiculed his
younger rival with exaggerated facial gestures. “It’s Rubio!” he shouted
to loud applause and cheers.
The escalation arrived
four days before the single biggest day of voting in the Republican
campaign, on March 1, and amid mounting alarm within the leadership of
the party that its rank-and-file voters keep embracing a figure they
view as hostile to their values and unworthy of their nomination.
Mr. Rubio seemed to
relish his new role as a mischievous and combative saboteur,
theatrically reading Mr. Trump’s misspelled online postings in front of
an audience in Houston and describing what he said was Mr. Trump’s
descent into anxiety-ridden sweatiness backstage in between commercial
breaks at their debate Thursday night.
“He was having a
meltdown,” Mr. Rubio said, pacing a rafter in what at times felt like a
stand-up routine. “He was applying makeup around his mustache, because
he had one of those sweat mustaches.”
The crowd roared.
Having tried and
failed in so many ways to catch fire this campaign season, Mr. Rubio
settled on a novel thrust: portraying Mr. Trump as a con man who has
tricked Republicans into believing he is an honest business man and a
genuine conservative.
“He is pulling the ultimate con job on the American people,” Mr. Rubio said. “It’s time to unmask him for what he is.”
But what Mr. Rubio did
not count on was Mr. Christie, a totem of the Northeastern Republican
establishment, bolting to Mr. Trump’s side on Friday and delivering the
businessman’s biggest endorsement.
In doing so, Mr.
Christie openly defied Republican attempts to isolate Mr. Trump as an
unsavory party crasher and handed the frontrunner an inexhaustible,
media-savvy surrogate who on Friday pledged to travel the country
campaigning for Mr. Trump and savaging his rivals.
Mr. Christie wasted
little time in pursuing Mr. Rubio, a first-term legislator whom he holds
in contempt for stealing his donors, knee-capping his campaign with
brutal ads in New Hampshire and repeatedly surpassing him in the polls.
Brushing off Mr.
Rubio’s pugnacious turn, Mr. Christie derided it a fake,
consultant-driven performance of a “desperate” candidate. “Part of his
talking points now is to be entertaining and smile a lot now,” Mr.
Christie said. “Listen, it’s one act after another.”
Behind the scenes, Mr.
Trump diligently had courted Mr. Christie over the phone and in person
over the past few weeks, despite the billionaire’s frequent dismissal of
endorsements and the blandishments required to obtain them.
Mr. Trump and his
wife, Melania, hosted Mr. Trump and his wife, Mary Pat, at Trump Tower
in Midtown Manhattan for several hours on Thursday, according to a
person briefed on the encounter. The talks apparently soothed whatever
hurt remained from the pungent words the two men have used to describe
each other: Mr. Christie has said that Mr. Trump lacks the “temperament”
to be president while Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Christie of blessing
the scandalous lane closures on the George Washington Bridge that was
engineered by the governor’s allies. (Mr. Christie has long denied any
knowledge of the scheme, let alone a role in it.)
During a joint
appearance in Fort Worth, Mr. Christie described his support as a
gesture of loyalty to an old friend and an assessment of who stood the
best chance of defeating the Democratic nominee in November.
But Mr. Trump seemed
fixated, above all, on Mr. Christie’s talent for bludgeoning opponents
like Mr. Rubio, as he did during a Republican debate a few weeks ago, by
seizing on his penchant for robotic repetition. “I thought he was gonna
die,” Mr. Trump observed, as Mr. Christie stood to his side. “Good
going, Chris,” he added.
The timing of their
partnership immediately (and, it seemed, strategically) distracted from a
growing liability for Mr. Trump: demands from Republican rivals and
leaders that he release his tax returns. Mr. Trump has resisted those
calls, saying that an audit by the Internal Revenue Service made it
impractical for him to release his returns.
As the scatological schoolyard taunts passed back and forth on Friday, slack-jawed voters struggled to contain their shock.
“I think Emily Post
would be totally just turning in her grave right now,” said Tammy Ross
52, after attending a rally for Rubio in Oklahoma City on Friday
afternoon. “Anyone can say anything,” she tisk-tisked.
Cable news anchors fumbled for words sufficient to describe what they were hearing.
“Oh. My. God,”
declared John Berman of CNN, after hearing Mr. Rubio vivisection of Mr.
Trump in Dallas, which included this description of why the developer
needed a full-length mirror backstage during the debate. “Maybe to make
sure his pants weren’t wet. I don’t know,” Mr. Rubio cracked.
“It is on!” declared his startled co-host, Kate Bouldin.
As Mr. Trump and Mr.
Rubio exchanged blistering broadsides, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas at
times seemed to be an afterthought. Amid the caustic exchanges, Mr. Cruz
discussed the finer points of federal water regulations during a taped
interview in Nashville and engaged in an online war of words about
immigration with Dennis Rodman, the retired basketball star.
When I was leading the fight against amnesty, @realDonaldTrump was firing @dennisrodman on TV. #RhetoricvsRecord https://t.co/Z8Biw0vVOF— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 26, 2016
Mr. Rodman managed to maintain the prevailing tenor of the day.
In his own message, he
acknowledged that Mr. Trump had indeed fired him on his hit NBC reality
show, “The Apprentice,” and, deploying an expletive, warned Mr. Cruz
that the businessman would soon dispatch with him as well.
Mr. Rodman ended with Mr. Trump’s campaign battle cry: “#MakeAmericaGreatAgain.”
Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting from Nashville, and Ashley Parker reported from Oklahoma City.
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