This piece by Andrea Bernstein in the New York Review of Books opens with a rundown of Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal in which he attempted to induce all the Democratic mayors in New Jersey to endorse him by offering favors. He wanted a “bipartisan” sheen so he could run for president in 2016. It worked with a lot of them. But not all:
[Mark]Sokolich, a Democrat, did not endorse Christie. That was when three former aides of the governor, steeped in this culture of raw displays of dominance, put the Bridgegate scheme into effect. Calling on the resources of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, they realigned lanes on the George Washington Bridge in a way that specifically punished Mayor Sokolich by creating “traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
They refused to take the mayor’s calls when four days of gridlock on the approaches to the world’s busiest bridge blocked ambulances and made children late on the first day of school. (One of Christie’s aides subsequently pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, resulting in the convictions now being argued before the Supreme Court.)
The traffic scheme also had a more general purpose: to telegraph to every other Democratic official in New Jersey that it was better simply to fall in line with Christie’s political wishes than to cross him in any way.
She makes, the obvious connection:
This type of behavior is precisely equivalent to the conduct for which President Trump was put on trial. He called a democratically elected president of Ukraine, and asked him to “do us a favor though.” That “favor” was to open an investigation that would both discredit the prosecution of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and so reinforce Trump’s narrative about the “Russia hoax,” and at the same time smear the man Trump considered was his chief political opponent in the 2020 presidential election: Joe Biden.
Like Sokolich, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was made to understand that the price for non-cooperation could be ruinously steep: losing vital military aid and an audience with the president at the White House. Trump’s aides, instilled with their own culture of raw displays of dominance, worked overtime to use the levers of government to enhance the power of their boss.
It now appears that both abuses of power will be sanctioned, with potentially crippling consequences for fighting corruption in America.
The piece goes on to point out how the Supreme Court has also validated this new system.
This is the political worldview of the strongman. It’s no surprise that Christie and Trump are the two most famous American practitioners. And, as we find in the schoolyard, the bully always has a group of sycophants and accomplices backing him up.
We’ve had experience with political bosses before in this country. But it’s been a while. We had thought our democracy and our political culture had evolved past this. But it hasn’t. We just saw the entire Republican Senate caucus wield it’s power ruthlessly and without apology to protect its corrupt, unfit leader.
Bernstein’s book,by the way, is very good.