Did Chris Christie deliver?

Earlier this week, I wrote about how Chris Christie ripped his former ally Donald Trump for not delivering on key agenda items as president. I agreed generally with Christie’s complaint, but noted that, as Trump’s term went on and he replaced some of his early appointees, the delivery improved.

I suggested several possible explanations for why Trump got off to a slow start, but omitted an important one — Chris Christie.

A friend reminds me that, as a candidate for president, Trump tapped Christie to head his transition team. Unfortunately, Christie did very little, if anything, to prepare for the transition. Perhaps he assumed that Hilary Clinton would win the election. Many of us did, but that’s no excuse for Christie to have ignored performing his assigned duty.

Soon after the election, Christie’s dereliction of duty became evident to Trump. Therefore, on November 11, the president-elect fired him.

Officially, vice president-elect Pence took over as transition team head. In practice, it fell to the law firm of Jones Day to build a transition team from nothing. The firm assigned some associates to work fulltime on vetting people just to work on the transition. All of this work was pro bono.

Chris Christie isn’t the only reason why the Trump administration failed to deliver in important ways — far from it. But given his contribution to the failure, it’s a remarkable display of chutzpah for Christie to attack Trump on that ground.

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