24 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
STRANGERTHANFICTION
S PACEGUARDIANS
T
he U.S. Space Force—the sixth mil-
itary service branch, which turns
two years old next month—provides re-
sources to protect and defend America’s
satellites from the likes of the Chinese
and the Russians. Space Force members
also operate the Global Positioning Sys-
tem satellite constellation, providing
G.P.S. services, for free, to everyone on
the planet. All extremely important stuff.
Yet the Space Force is considered some-
thing of a joke—the subject of late-night
gibes and Internet memes. Critics have
derided it as a vanity project of Presi-
dent Trump, a campaign-rally applause
line somehow made real. Last year, when
Trump unveiled the Space Force logo,
which bears a striking resemblance to
“Star Trek”’s Starfleet insignia, Twitter
lit up. (“Ahem,” tweeted the original “Star
Trek” cast member George Takei. “We are
expecting some royalties from this...”)
Also undercutting the serious nature of
the service: the Netflix comedy series
“Space Force,” which stars Steve Carell
as the branch’s bullheaded leader.
If any of this bothers General John W.
( Jay) Raymond, the inaugural head of
the Space Force, he doesn’t let on. The
memeification of the force? “To me, it
means that there’s a lot of excitement
about space,” he said recently, sitting in
a meeting room in Columbia Universi-
ty’s International Affairs Building. The
four-star general, who is based at the
Pentagon, was visiting between rounds
of the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge,
a largely virtual competition in which
thirty-two student teams from across the
globe made policy recommendations in
reaction to a hypothetical cyber-warfare
scenario. (This one began with a breach
made in “U.S. space sector ground sta-
tions’ systems,” an attack apparently un-
dertaken by “Chinese state-sponsored
actors.”) The event at Columbia, a part-
nership with a think tank called the At-
lantic Council, was organized by the Dig-
ital and Cyber Group, which is run by
graduate students at the School of Inter-
national and Public Affairs (SIPA).
Raymond, who is fifty-nine, with a
head shaved bald, pointed to a space-op-
erations badge pinned to his jacket. He
noted that the delta symbol at its center
had been used by the Air Force—fromwhich the Space Force sprung—years be-
fore “Star Trek”’s 1966 début. Raymond
explained that the branch “was not a Pres-
ident Trump thing” but had been under
discussion for decades, and came about
owing to bipartisan support in Congress.
The service now has close to thirteen
thousand members, known as “guard-
ians.” “Everybody said we stole it from
‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’” Raymond said.
“Well, no.” The term derives from the
Air Force Space Command motto from
1983, “Guardians of the High Frontier.”
Raymond comes from a military fam-
ily going back to 1865. His great-great-
grandfather, great-grandfather, grand-
father, and father all went to West Point
and had careers in the Army. Raymond
broke with tradition by attending Clem-
son University on the R.O.T.C. pro-
gram and joining the Air Force. Still,
he’s a little bit rock and roll: at the Pa-
triot Fest 2017 concert at Peterson Air
Force Base, in Colorado, he sat in on
drums with the country duo Thomp-
son Square, for a performance of its hit
“Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not.”
Raymond made his way to speak to
about thirty people gathered in an audi-
torium, including a half-dozen members
of the Digital and Cyber Group, who
were wearing matching space-graphicrevelled in his own tantrums. And so,
when he allows that he admires Trump’s
“let-’em-squirm fearlessness,” he is also
admiring himself.
Christie finally reaches his limit when
Trump refuses to accept the election re-
sults and helps provoke the January 6th
insurrection. Not that Christie, for all
his insider status, had thought it was in
Trump’s character to do so. The night
before the election, he assured a Cana-
dian interviewer that Trump and Biden
were “both responsible men” and that,
should Biden win, there was “no ques-
tion in my mind that President Trump
will participate in a peaceful transition
of power.” Rather than admitting that
he was wrong all along about Trump, he
touts his own bravery when he tells
George Stephanopoulos, on ABC, that
“I disagree” with Trump’s seditious course.
This is rather like disagreeing with the
assault on Fort Sumter.
Christie is a canny narrator. He main-
tains over-all fealty to Trump, but wants
you to know that he understands what
kind of human being Trump is. In the
waning months of the Administration,
Christie was invited to the White House
to attend the Rose Garden introduc-
tion of Amy Coney Barrett as a Su-
preme Court nominee and to help pre-
pare Trump for a debate with Biden.
Christie confirms how heedless Trump
and his Administration were about
covid—masks were scorned in the
White House––and, predictably, many
officials and visitors, including Trump
and Christie, got sick. While Trump
was hospitalized at Walter Reed, he
called Christie, who was suffering at a
hospital in New Jersey. The President
wanted to know one thing: “Are you
gonna say you got it from me?”
Christie doesn’t blame Trump. He
doesn’t dare. He lets him off the hook.
“And that was the last call I got in the
hospital from Donald Trump,” he writes.
Christie will never say bluntly what
he knows to be true: that Trump’s Pres-idency had dire consequences for the
country. Trump was impeached twice,
yet Christie does not grapple much with
that record. Instead, he insists that the
Republicans must look forward. They
must part ways with the militia crazies
and the conspiracy theorists, to be sure,
but above all they must wage battle with
Biden, an “anticapitalist” who is impos-
ing critical race theory on “unsuspect-
ing” children. The climate catastrophe,
the menace of authoritarianism at home
and around the world—the biggest chal-
lenges that we face seem to interest Chris-
tie no more than they do the political
party he hopes to lead. In “Republican
Rescue,” he is asking the G.O.P. to sup-
port him because he was by Trump’s side
until the ugly coda, when he wasn’t. The
campaign slogan that comes out of this
book might as well be “Vote for Chris
Christie. Saner than Rudolph Giuliani.”
Not exactly “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,”
but it’s what he’s got.
––David Remnick