In an era of maddeningly careful politics, Gov. Chris Christie rocketed to national stardom as brazenly incautious. His excesses defined him: the scorching rants, the seductive oversharing, the caustic insults and endless public feuds.
Harmless theatrics, he said.
But the in-your-face instincts and boundary-breaking behavior that Mr. Christie brought to public life found a vindictive host in the fiercely loyal circle around him, as the federal indictment of a top appointee and a former deputy chief of staff in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing scandal laid bare on Friday.
The 37-page charging document recounts a ruthless act of political retribution: to punish a small-town mayor for refusing to endorse Mr. Christie's 2013 re-election, the governor's confidants unleashed a major traffic jam that gridlocked ordinary commuters, emergency responders and children on the first day of school.
Nowhere does the indictment say Mr. Christie, a Republican, knew of the scheme or was involved in it.
Highlights
The latest news on the criminal proceedings over the George Washington Bridge lane closings in 2013 that caused traffic problems in Fort Lee, N.J., and a political black eye for Gov. Chris Christie.
Yet it was a crime of political vengeance, the indictment makes clear, that was conceived in furtherance of Mr. Christie's political ambitions, and carried out in his name.
Now, the growing risk for Mr. Christie is that the very belligerence that electrified voters, the press and the Republican Party, and catapulted him into a credible contender for the White House, may wind up putting the presidency out of his reach.
Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science at Montclair State University who has studied Mr. Christie closely for years, said the indictments of Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, once two of the governor's most loyal and trusted lieutenants, spelled the death knell for his national aspirations.
"Even if he is not directly connected to the indictments," Professor Harrison said, "he is guilty of creating a political culture in which corruption was allowed to flourish."
Mr. Christie faces the specter of a lengthy and embarrassing criminal trial overshadowing the 2016 presidential campaign, in which the star witness — David Wildstein, a onetime Christie loyalist who pleaded guilty on Friday to two counts of conspiracy — still maintains the governor was aware of the lane-closing plot as it happened.
Even so, Mr. Christie treated the outcome of the federal investigation as a personal exoneration.
"Today's charges make clear that what I've said from day one is true," the governor posted on Twitter. "I had no knowledge or involvement in the planning or execution of this act."
But exoneration of the man is not exoneration of his leadership style.
Mr. Christie and his staff have a history of punishing those who have crossed him. There was the state college professor whose budget was vetoed after he failed to sign off on a project that Mr. Christie favored. The mayor of Jersey City whose meetings with the governor's staff were summarily canceled hours after he said he would not endorse Mr. Christie's re-election. The attempt, even before the lane closings, to freeze out the mayor of Fort Lee for failing to back Mr. Christie.
"There was a level of arrogance," Ms. Harrison said, "that would seem to be coming from the top down."
Mr. Christie, whose bipartisan popularity and fund-raising prowess were once the envy of his party, is now a man without a clear path to the Republican nomination. His poll numbers are sagging badly. Voters openly taunt him at public events about the bridge episode. Donors fret about his viability. And longtime allies are defecting to rival campaigns.
Two weeks ago, State Senator Joseph M. Kyrillos of New Jersey, a trusted Christie friend who served as chairman of his 2009 campaign for governor, declared his support for Jeb Bush.
In candid moments, close allies of Mr. Christie acknowledge that his shot at winning the White House, which seemed so plausible a year ago, may have passed.
Mr. Christie is fond of talking about the "kill shot" in politics: the fatal moment when a candidacy switches from viable to moribund. But over the past year, the governor has suffered a series of smaller, but still significant, wounds: He oversaw nine downgrades of New Jersey's credit rating; the repeated overestimation of state revenue projections; and the failure to make a $ 1.6 billion payment to New Jersey's deeply underfunded pension system.
A growing number of Republican operatives say that Mr. Christie has, in a sense, already bled out.
"Politically, he's been dead for a year," said Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican political strategist, who is not aligned with any campaign for the 2016 race.
"It wasn't just the bridge," Mr. Wilson continued. "It was that there were any number of better, more conservative, more electable candidates."
New Jersey, he added, "isn't the kind of economic success story that he could build a campaign around."
As a parade of comparatively unblemished Republican rivals declare their candidacies, Mr. Christie has put off an announcement until late spring or early summer.
Presidential candidates have weathered messy campaign-season scandals. In 1992, Bill Clinton survived revelations of a longtime sexual affair with Gennifer Flowers, the existence of which he vigorously denied.
But Americans are historically most forgiving of personal scandals involving deeply contrite officials. The problem for Mr. Christie is that the closing of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge stand as a unique case of public betrayal, an act mystifying in its meanness and unsettling in its indifference to the thousands of motorists involved.
From the start, Mr. Christie treated the closings as a nuisance, suggested the episode did not merit his attention and derided those who wondered whether his administration had played a role.
"I was the guy out there, in overalls and a hat," he declared mockingly during a news conference in early December 2013. "I actually was the guy working the cones out there."
Within a few weeks, damning emails emerged showing that Ms. Kelly, his top political aide, had been deeply involved.
Those close to Mr. Christie vow that he will push ahead with a presidential campaign, regardless of his standing in the polls or his fund-raising totals.
He is a practiced political gambler with a history of defying odds.
Little was expected of him when President George W. Bush chose Mr. Christie, a little-known corporate lawyer and Republican fund-raiser, to take on the high-profile job of United States attorney for New Jersey in 2001. He turned it into a national platform for fighting public corruption. He faced daunting electoral math in 2009 when he challenged a wealthy, incumbent Democratic governor, Jon S. Corzine, in a reliably blue state. Mr. Christie prevailed, then won re-election by an overwhelming margin.
These days, friends said, Mr. Christie is realistic about his chances in a crowded Republican nominating contest. He has devoured the polls. He has assessed the field.
But no matter the outcome, they said, Mr. Christie feels he has one more in-your-face battle left to wage.
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