Chris Christie is desperately trying to claw his way back in from the cold after anti-Trump rocker Bruce Springsteen brutally snubbed him at a concert.
The Republican former New Jersey governor posted a beaming photo of himself side-by-side with The Boss on Sunday night with a caption lifted from Springsteen’s seminal 1980 hit “The River”: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?”
The self-soothing share follows waves of online ridicule after Springsteen ignored Christie’s bid for a high-five at a gig at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Thursday night.
It is unclear when exactly Christie’s new image is from, given that both men appear to be in different clothes from the ones they were wearing at the show.
Footage of the snub shows 63-year-old Christie, who says he’s been a huge fan of The Boss since the tender age of 13, enthusiastically grooving to the anti-MAGA rocker’s performance.
At one point, Springsteen, 76, departed the stage to make his way, still singing, through the crowd. It was at that point Christie leaned in with an outstretched hand for some contact with his idol—to no avail.
Video shows the ex-governor, who was in office from 2010 to 2018, looking crestfallen. His grin collapsed, he withdrew his hand, threw an anxious look at the person beside him, and tried to rally with a slow clap.
The two men, both avowed critics of the president in their own right, have shared an on-off relationship going back years.
Christie, whose X profile lists “Springsteen fan” up there with his credentials as a “husband” and “proud father,” told libertarian podcast The Fifth Column earlier in March that they now “talk” and “text.”
“When I was U.S. attorney, he liked some of the stuff I was doing to clean up Asbury Park, and I put a number of Asbury Park officials in jail for corruption. He liked that,” Christie told the show. His stint as U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, where Springsteen is also from, lasted from 2002 to 2008.
“Then I got elected to governor, and he didn’t really like that too much because I was a Republican—am a Republican,” he added.
Springsteen most famously made his displeasure over Christie’s gubernatorial performance known with a 2014 parody song on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, mocking Christie’s role in the “Bridgegate” scandal, in which his aides choked off access to the George Washington Bridge after a local mayor declined to endorse him.
A chance airport encounter two years later thawed the freeze, with the rocker apologizing in person, according to Christie, for “piling on.”
The Boss’ contempt for President Donald Trump is as well-known as it is longstanding. Springsteen came out against the president in 2016 and has held fast since, prompting repeated insults from Trump, including comparing the 76-year-old music icon to a “dried up prune.”
Christie’s split with his one-time political patron has proven just as dramatic. The former governor, an enthusiastic 2016 Trump backer who went on to chair the president’s opioid task force, now counts among his loudest Republican critics, branding him a “coward” and a “puppet” of Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin.
