Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Chris Christie’s decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination is of particular interest to me. This is not because he is the only Republican candidate to date who is unapologetic in calling out the former president for unacceptable behavior, nor because I think Christie has a chance of winning. Rather because of the perspective after a one-on-one discussion the two of us had in the summer of 2019.
I attended the Aspen Institute's annual Ideas Festival in June 2019. The festival is a weeklong event where people from all over the world cross-pollinate their fields to discuss their unique accomplishments and dedication to improving their communities while making advances within their field of work.
One of the featured speakers was Chris Christie and I remember the evening well as he was interviewed by Jeff Goldberg, The Atlantic’s Editor in Chief before a packed crowd at the Hotel Jerome in downtown Aspen.
With the upcoming presidential election of 2020 on everyone's mind, plus the added fact that Christie was then a supporter of President Trump, the event was of great interest to everyone. Goldberg started the conversation bluntly inquiring what Christie saw in Trump that other people don’t see.
Christie responded: “I’ve known him for 17 years so my perspective is a bit broader than most. But, let me start off by saying this, elections are not about who you want to vote for. Elections are about who you’re left to vote for. To be clear, Donald Trump was not my first choice for president.” Jokingly, he added, “I was.”
Christie went on to make it clear that, “Trump was not my first choice to be president,” but justified his support by saying, “Here’s our choice- we sit on the sidelines and do nothing or we can try to make him better.”
Goldberg wasn’t satisfied with the answer and continued to probe Christie if his opinion has changed since 2016, given the opportunity to witness Trump's behavior the last three years. Christie responded by saying, “no, he’s no different now, he’s not changing” and then went on to justify his support by detailing the litany of what Christie considered to be good policy that Trump had gotten through Congress or unilaterally mandated through executive action, which warranted his support.
The questioning continued on many subjects related to Trump's questionable character or lack thereof, including his perceived racial slurs and other incendiary remarks since 2016. Christie deflected the questions with the defense of Trump that I have heard so often, outlining that he doesn't necessarily “like some of his antics” nor “condone his character flaws” but he endorses him because he agrees with his policies.
I find this Kabuki dance interesting especially given that Republicans focus on family and religious values. I took exception to much of Christie’s rationale that evening in Aspen for supporting President Trump but wasn’t called upon during the question and answer period.
Fortunately, the very next evening I attended a small dinner event that Christie and his wife attended. The interview of the previous night was still very much on my mind and so after dinner I had a chance to speak to Christie alone as the guests mingled and I brought up the Goldberg interview of the previous night.
I communicated to Christie my inference from the evening that he found many things about President Trump to be abhorrent but nothing at this juncture had risen to the level that he would throw his support to another candidate.
He seemed to agree with my assessment and so I continued:
“So based on what I heard you say last night, am I correct that if Trump's behavior became so bad, and he did something that reached a given threshold in your mind you would not only denounce the action but you would withdraw your support from him.”
Christie thought for a moment and said, “Yes.”
That surprised me so I asked what that threshold would be and, being the adept politician that he is, he had the perfect, crafty politician non-answer:
“David, do you remember the Supreme Court ruling about pornography in 1964 and what Justice Potter Stewart said?”
I am not particularly well versed in the SCOTUS ruling minutia so I admitted that I had no idea what Christie was referring to and asked him to explain.
“Stewart in explaining what pornography is said this: ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ and so David I can’t say now what the line is with Trump, but I’ll know it when I see it.”
I was taken aback by the answer but I let it go. Since that evening, I’ve thought considerably about Christie’s answer in relationship to Trump's comments in Charlottesville about there being good people on both sides, or when he attacked a Gold Star family with unsubstantiated insults about this war hero being a member of the Muslim brotherhood, or the countless other childish insults he used and continues to use against anyone who disagrees with him on policy or anything else.
For the three years since that encounter, I’ve asked myself many times that if Christie and other Republicans haven’t seen it yet, will they ever see it and subsequently call out Trump's behavior? Finally after four years, Christie has finally seen it and knows what that disqualifying behavior is. Seemingly, it is the disregard for the rule of law that leads to insurrection and threatens our national security.
On Fox News Christie depicted Trump as “as a juvenile who should be sent to his room, not White House.”
Well I guess he now knows it because he’s seen it.
In other speeches Christie has stated that January 6th and Trump's total disregard for the rule of law put him over the edge and stated last week that Trump is "A lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog and is not a leader." At one point last week he delivered a mocking impression of Trump claiming he would build a southern border wall at Mexico's expense and said Trump, more than Biden, was to blame for the country's failed immigration policy.
Trump still has a commanding lead in what has become a crowded pack of more than a half dozen Republican presidential candidates; the question remains whether Republican primary voters, like Christie, will finally know it when they see it.
I have my doubts.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.