Stile: Christie frames speech in ‘Trump talk’

Since jumping on the Trump-for-president bandwagon in February, Christie has had to run damage control, downplaying Trump’s outlandish remarks while carefully avoiding any suggestion that he personally endorsed Trump’s views.

But that seemed to change Tuesday. During a freewheeling and combative State House news conference, Christie’s answers featured some of Trump’s pander-to-the-base conspiracy tropes.

At one point Christie slammed the Obama administration, saying it paid “ransom” and “in cash” to the Iranian government, an echo of Trump’s own accusation that the administration paid Iran $400 million for the release of U.S. prisoners earlier this year. The payment was part of a $1.7 billion settlement announced earlier in the year, the Obama administration said, and the hostage release was the result of a separate negotiation.

And Trump backed off his repeated claims that he saw footage of the exchange after it was proven that no such footage exists. But Christie was in full-throated campaign mode, reprising his own attack on Obama as a feckless leader and labeling Iranian leaders as “thugs.”

And then there was Christie’s use Tuesday of a favorite Trump tactic — citing a vague, unsubstantiated charge or suspicion and attributing it to “what some people are saying.” That has allowed Trump to give credence to rumors — like citing a tabloid report linking U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s father with President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Christie was asked about Trump’s repeated warning that he will blame a “rigged” election system if he loses in November. Critics argue that Trump is laying the groundwork for a legal challenge if he loses to Hillary Clinton, a move that would only sow more voter cynicism in the election process and upend the orderly transition of power in place since George Washington retired.

But Christie steered the discussion away from Trump and toward his own theory of voter distrust. He said suspicions of systemic voter fraud — namely in urban, Democratic strongholds – has already undermined voter confidence in elections. His proof? A general “concern,” Christie said, shared by “some” that the election system “is not as fair as it should be.”

Christie went a step further than Trump, by arguing that he subscribes to the unfounded idea that voter fraud is widespread and that he shaped his two campaigns for governor on the belief that it occurs.

“I’ll tell you this — in both of our elections, we assumed that a certain amount of fraud was going to go on, when we were making our own projections,” he said. “There are people, and I’m confident, not only in this state, but in all the other 49 states, who are voting but are not supposed to be voting. I don’t know how you quantify that.”

Christie also hewed closely to Trump’s conspiracy-laden messaging on Hillary Clinton’s health. In a speech Monday, Trump said Clinton “lacks the physical and mental stamina” to fight the Islamic State group, a remark that reflected a growing drumbeat of suspicion on Fox News and other conservative outlets that Clinton is hiding serious health issues.

When asked if Clinton has the sufficient mental and physical stamina to run for president, Christie said: “We’ll find out. We’ll find out. Campaigning’s tough. I’ve campaigned a lot of times. It’s tough. It’s hard work. We’ll find out.”

Christie’s embrace of Trump talk is surprising given his own disdain for conspiracy “crazies” who railed over his nomination of Sohail Mohammed, a Muslim-American from Passaic County, to serve as a Superior Court judge in 2011.

That outburst helped define Christie as a special, defiant Republican who refused to be swallowed up in the party’s far right wing. He also cultivated a brand as a hard-knuckled moderate who courted women, minorities and immigrant groups. He was a candidate who stayed on message, despite an occasional town hall outburst.

But now Christie is Trump’s man, following the lead of his improvisational candidate who traffics in right wing rumor and has insulted minorities, immigrants, women and veterans. Christie’s pursuit of a career after Trenton, perhaps a perch of power in the Trump-led Washington, D.C., has him defending Trump’s “extreme vetting” of foreign immigrants, downplaying a New York Times story detailing Trump adviser Paul Manafort’s ties to Russian-linked companies and putting a rosy spin on Trump’s post-convention nose dive in the polls.

Christie argued that the first debate on Sept. 26 could boost Trump’s fortunes.

“Nothing is unfixable or insurmountable until you tell me how that debate’s going to go,” Christie said. “There’s going to be so much attention to it that it can completely transform a race overnight. So I won’t be concerned — if I ever am concerned — about Donald’s campaign until after that. I’m confident that this will be a competitive race.”

There are other signs of the Trump influence. Christie, for example, gave his most emphatic endorsement of laws requiring voters to show some form of legal identification. As he prepared his 2013 reelection run in moderate, Democrat-heavy New Jersey, Christie had carefully stayed out of the national debate on the issue. On Tuesday he was arguing the ID laws were necessary to ensure the integrity of the election process and dismissing Democrats who saw the spate of voter ID laws as an attempt to suppress minority voters.

“When I voted at the student government election at the University of Delaware I had to show my ID. No one really felt all that discriminated against, I don’t think,” he said.

At that time, Christie was an up-and-coming student government leader who would later develop the “Campus Action Party” into a formidable student political machine. There he forged his own identity and later he would deploy some of those skills during his campaign for governor.

Now, he’s a Trump man.