- It wasn’t just Christie who had been fired. It was the entire transition team – although no one ever told them so directly. As Nancy Cook reported in Politico, Bannon visited the transition headquarters a few days after he had given Christie the news, and made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Trump into the bin. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”
Is this an "I'm Chris Christie, I know the Trump presidency is collapsing, and I want to be seen as a Republican criticizing them before it does" piece? Either way, four adminstrations from now this is going to be an interesting chapter in high school history.
The republicans criticizing Trump all have one thing in common. They're not seeking re-election. It's more than a safe bet that they serve as an accurate mouthpiece for the establishment GOP hoping to keep their seats, who have to bite their own tongues. Meanwhile, some of them are losing their seats to more extremist candidates that have been enabled by Trump. Of course, the left is also undergoing a sort of radicalization reaction as well. I started binge watching Veep, and it is hilarious to frame the Trump administration in the context of that show. Many of the "scandals" navigated by the fictitious staff wouldn't make it into the news cycle nowadays. Season six was made in 2017, and I'm anxious to see if the show doesn't start taking cues from actual events and reach a level of ironic absurdity deliberately designed to ridicule Trumpian politics.