Chris Christie's Last Fight
By
Jason ZengerleThis wasn’t how he figured it would end. A year after being steamrolled by Donald Trump, Chris Christie is hobbling out of office as the most unpopular governor in the history of New Jersey—a casualty of scandal and hubris, and a guy freed up to quietly pursue the toughest job of his life....................................................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.
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https://www.gq.com/story/chris-christie-profile-2017
