Epstein Secrets

gan his campaign for president he had almost no friends in politics. The only two actual politicians with whom Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were in their own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he knew nothing— nothing at all—about the basic intellectual foundations o

The day after the election, Trump’s close advisers—suddenly eager to be part of a process that almost everybody had ignored—immediately began blaming Christie for a lack of transition preparations. Hurriedly, the bare-bones transition team moved from downtown Washington to Trump Tower. This was certainly s

political experience. Christie, like most Trump allies, fell in and out of favor. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump contemptuously measured Christie’s increasing distance from his losing enterprise, and then, with victory, his eagerness to get back in. Trump and Christie went back to Trump’s days t

law, carefully displacing as little air as possible: the massive and domineering older man, the reedy and pliant younger one. In the revised death-of-Chris-Christie story, it is not the deferential Jared who strikes back, but—in some sense even more satisfying for the revenge fantasy—Charlie Kushner himself who h

ain off-again presidential candidate, in 2010; at a meeting in Trump Tower, Bannon had proposed to Trump that he spend half a million dollars backing Tea Party-style candidates as a way to further his presidential ambitions. Bannon left the meeting figuring that Trump would never cough up that kind of dough.

st two presidential elections. More and more they are at odds with congressional Republicans, example — a couple months ago, it was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie chewing out House Speaker John Boehnerfor holding up Hurricane Sandy aid to his state. Their frustration is real and goes beyond routine M.- bashing

epublican Governors rule 3o states and many like Christie, Sandoval, McDonnell, and New Mexico's Susana Mar

en staunchly conservative ones, who even emitted a whiff of being somewhat reasonable. Conservative standard-bearer Orrin Hatch narrowly survived a Tea Party challenge last year. Hatch wasn't as fortunate as his fellow conservative from Utah, Bob Bennett, who lost to his primary challenger in 2010, just

City. And Mar-a-Lago. And Trump SoHo. Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on th

as going to throw him in the soup. Manafort was going to roll. And it wasn’t just Russia. It was Atlantic City. And Mar-a-Lago. And Trump SoHo. Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on the DOJ and the FBI, and ever assuring Trump of their inside sources—encouraged him to take the view t

right, meanwhile, was more and more challenged by younger conservatives. In the Obama years, the conservative movement was increasingly bewildered by Tea Party rejectionism and a new iconoclastic right-wing media, exemplified by Breitbart News, which was pointedly excluded from the CPAC conference. In 2011,

An Obama guy will be acting attorney general. I said you’re not going to get Rudy’—Trump had again revived a wish for his loyalists Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie to take the job—‘“because he was on the campaign and will have to recuse himself, and Chris Christie, too, so those are masturbatory fantasies, get t

2-96, 298 chemical weapons, 183-84, 190-93, 265 Cheney, Dick, 27 China, 6-8, 39, 100, 193-94, 211, 226, 228, 258, 267, 269-70, 297 Chopra, Deepak, 80 Christie, Chris, 16, 24-25, 30-31, 210, 242, 279 Christoff, Niki, 78 Churchill, Winston, 50 Circa news website, 159, 257 Clapper, James, 41, 214-15 Clinton, B

9 Suzy magazine, 15 Swan, Jonathan, 299 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020135 Syria, 42, 183-84, 188-93, 219, 226, 265 Taliban, 267 tax reform, 87, 167, 224, 290 Tea Party, 5, 18, 26, 33, 58-59, 128, 161-63 Thiel, Peter, 21, 222, 309 Thrush, Glenn, 91, 277 Tillerson, Rex, 4, 21, 86, 211, 225, 229, 265, 267, 296, 304-6 T

re at least two possible outcomes: First, the pragmatists win. The Grand Old Party could be led out of the wilderness by a charismatic figure a la Chris Christie, who is viewed as a straight-talking, practical problem-solver. Any such leader will have to arise outside Washington. The pragmatists' backers woul

s much too early to draw hard conclusions, Chris Christie proved that a moderate, common-sense Republican c

POLITICS BEAST How the Tea Party's Apocalyptic Politics Are Destroying the Republican Party Joe McLean: Nov 11, 2013 Tea Party leaders view themselves as modern prophets of the end of times, ratcheting up their rhetoric to prove that Obama is evil and God is on their side.