ATLANTA—When Chris Christie threw his support behind Donald Trump, Washington gasped. But the wall of establishment opposition to Trump’s candidacy had begun cracking days before New Jersey’s governor barreled right through it.

From Rep. Duncan Hunter and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who have signaled an openness to working with Trump, to Mike Huckabee’s daughter and adviser Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who officially joined Trump's campaign this week, Republican officials and operatives are coming to grips with the reality that this anti-establishment hero is now the presumptive GOP nominee.


“Folks are now going through the stages of grief,” said one high-ranking Republican operative. “Some are already at acceptance.”

For Christie, the endorsement was his only path to national relevance after quitting the presidential contest. For Trump, it was much more. Not only did it allow him to change the news cycle after getting roughed up by the establishment’s last hope, Marco Rubio, but it lent credence to Trump’s charge that Washington is full of easily maneuvered politicians.

Here are five takeaways from the Republican primary’s Friday shake-up.

1. The establishment’s opposition to Trump is crumbling.

After Trump’s blowout win in Nevada Tuesday night, his phone apparently rang off the hook.

On Wednesday, Trump won his first endorsements from members of Congress: Hunter and Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.). On Monday, the day before his romp in the Nevada caucuses, McCarthy, a California Republican, said he believed Trump will be his party’s nominee and that he’d be able to work with him.

Meanwhile, several Capitol Hill staffers, including a congressional chief of staff, and a number of state GOP staffers, have begun peddling their resumes to Trump’s campaign, according to a source involved in those back-channel conversations. “Everybody wants on the bus before it leaves the station,” he said.

History has shown that the political establishment always wins. Amidst this strange election cycle in which establishment candidates have fallen by the wayside, some establishment Republicans appear willing to win just by switching teams.

2. Trump is actually...a savvy politician!

Trump wants to act like the frontrunner that he is. On the debate stage Thursday night, his tempered responses about Planned Parenthood and Obamacare were those of a candidate already starting to think about the general election.

In his closing statement, Trump distinguished himself from his rival “politicians.” But Trump’s sense of timing is that of a savvy politician, not a clueless neophyte.

After Rubio tripped him up, Trump wasted no time finding a way out of a Friday morning news cycle that was being dominated by coverage of Rubio on a post-debate victory lap, savagely mocking Trump by reading his tweets aloud—gleefully pointing out his typos—to the crowd at his rally in Dallas.

But where Trump has sold himself as a businessman with a history of buying influence with corrupt politicians on both sides, his acceptance of his former political rival’s support on Friday now raises questions about the terms of the deal struck between the two.

Rival campaigns drew reporters’ attention to a story about Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, getting $93 million in tax breaks from Christie’s state government to build a high-rise in Jersey City. “I know a lot of people thought he was going after Marco on behalf of Jeb,” one Rubio backer said privately about Christie’s attack on Rubio two debates ago. “But I said even then, the Jersey connection made me think he was doing Trump’s dirty work.”

3. Christie had no other play

In 2012, Chris Christie was tapped to give the keynote address at the Republican National Convention. In 2014, he led the Republican Governors Association, serving as the party’s main emissary to donors on behalf of GOP governors. And it wasn’t so long ago that this establishment figure was a vocal Trump critic. He questioned Trump’s “thin-skinned” temperament and asserted that he is not “the kind of person you want to stand on the stage next September against Hillary.”

That makes his sudden break with the majority of his party’s official figures, most of whom are still horrified by the prospect of a Trump presidency, so remarkable.

But viewed in the context of 2016, it’s less surprising.

Christie won just 449 votes more than Ben Carson in the two states where they went head-to-head. His approval ratings are in the toilet back home in New Jersey, which seemingly precludes him from a future Senate run. Given his personal dislike for Rubio, largely as a result of the senator’s super PAC strafing Christie for months with a barrage of negative TV ads that drove down his numbers in New Hampshire, there’d be no place for him in a future Rubio administration. Jeb Bush is gone and John Kasich a long shot. That left Trump, Christie’s long-time friend who just happens to be sitting 20 points ahead of everyone else in the polls.

So for a politician who doesn’t like being out of the limelight and is facing the prospect of his career coming to an end, Friday’s endorsement wasn’t a profile in courage. It was the last, best option.

4. Rubio’s now in the fight of his life.

After mostly staying out of Trump’s direct line of sight and refusing to attack him up until now, Rubio has gone from zero to 100 miles an hour when it comes to finally taking aim at the current GOP frontrunner. And he’s alighted on the same tactic that President Obama showed five years earlier to be an effective approach to making Trump look small: savage mockery.

Not only did he make fun of Trump misspelling “chocker” and “honer” in his tweets, Rubio told his crowd Friday morning that Trump was sweating profusely during the commercial breaks Thursday night and even suggested that he’d wet his pants.

Rubio is hoping to bury Trump in an avalanche of opposition research about his business failures and apparent hypocrisy of hiring undocumented foreign workers to build Trump Tower. But Trump’s supporters thus far have signaled that they don’t really care about his personal foibles, lack of policy experience or the seedy underbelly of his long business record. And engaging so directly with Trump, and now Christie, will be the ultimate test of Rubio’s toughness.

Yes, the young senator has survived tens of millions of dollars in television ads attacking him. Yes, he rebounded quickly after withering in the face of Christie’s attacks last month and blowing a chance to consolidate the mainstream wing of the party behind him more quickly. But this is altogether different now, with two of the biggest backyard brawlers in politics coming at him.

Christie will serve as a reminder of Rubio’s worst moment in the campaign and continue to lambast him for not showing up to work in the Senate. A political performance artist par excellence, Trump mocked Rubio’s penchant for thirst-quenching Friday by splashing bottled water on his supporters. “The fight of Marco Rubio’s life is here, and it’ll either energize his campaign or it’ll end it,” one Rubio supporter said Friday. “But you have to slay the dragon at some point, and if he does, he’ll be more than ready for Hillary Clinton.”

5. Cruz has been completely marginalized on the eve of Super Tuesday.

If Rubio saw his dream news cycle snatched away by Trump, he can at least take solace in knowing that he is, at least for the moment, Trump’s top target—not essentially forgotten like Ted Cruz. The Texas senator, whose path to the nomination hinges on steamrolling across the South on Tuesday’s SEC primary, has been relegated to an afterthought just days ahead of those critical contests.

For more than a week, Cruz’s campaign has been trying to reverse a negative narrative about its “dirty tricks” that resulted in a disappointing third place finish in South Carolina. After another embarrassing flap earlier this week that led Cruz to fire his communications director, Rubio overshadowed Cruz in Thursday night’s debate as the Florida senator attacked Trump with more vigor and success.

On Friday, cable news coverage of the primary, which will have an even greater impact as the race broadens out into more of an air war across more than a dozen states, reflected the race as the Rubio campaign wants voters to see it: a two-man fight between their man and Trump.