OK, it's gone from mushrooms to acid, from weird to psychedelically weird.
This afternoon, Chris Christie announced his endorsement of Donald Trump. That actually wasn't so hard to see. If you're the Bridge-handicapped governor of New Jersey known for your temper, backing the edifice-obsessed mogul from across the river isn't that crazy a move. Christie becomes the first major office holder to back Trump. (So far the Orange Man has only picked up two house members.) This positions Christie to be on a Trump ticket or, at the least, Trump's liaison to the Republican Party as we once knew it. And really what choice did Christie have? Sit patiently? Not his style. Back Rubio? Oh, please. Christie is the one who pierced the boy in the plastic bubble.
As Michael Corleone said of Tessio, his betrayer in The Godfather: "It's the smart move." This is a position Christie can live with at Garden State diners and "down the shore," even if Trump fades.
And really, wouldn't it be the most pugnacious ticket since Nixon-Agnew? Usually the running mate is the hatchet man. Here he'd just be the blade sharpener.
Rubio tried to come back today—he mockingly read Trump tweets about him, which made for perhaps the most meta moment of any presidential campaign—but the trick didn't quite work. He wound up correcting Trump's spelling of words like lightweight. It was a wry moment but less funny than when Jimmy Kimmel has stars read the negative tweets about themselves.
Rubio did better later, speaking to reporters, flat-out calling Trump a "con man" who is hijacking the conservative movement. Likening Trump to a flimflam artist doesn't seem like a bad idea, but it's probably already baked in the cake. Poor Cruz (two words you may never see in sequence), totally overshadowed today, has been using a century-old metaphor comparing Trump to P.T. Barnum. How many Americans actually go to circuses?
For his part, Trump imitated Rubio at his speech in Texas today, mimicking Rubio's famed water lunge from the Floridian's response to Obama's State of the Union. Trump splashed water everywhere, called Rubio a choke artist and, for good measure, made fun of the senator for applying makeup with "a trowel," which seems odd coming from someone the hue of a life preserver.
Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham, in a speech, joked that his party had "gone batshit crazy." Except he wasn't joking.
