Standing before a room filled with lightly interested college students, self-described "political tourists" and even some honest-to-God undecided New Hampshire voters, Chris Christie used a town hall here last week to sketch out the political indictment against the defendant, Donald J. Trump, he thinks Republicans must prosecute to deny the former president his party's nomination.

Yet near the end of his remarks, Christie articulated something more revealing: The sense of fatalism that's fast gripping Republicans of all stripes about the inevitability of Trump again being the GOP standard bearer.

"What you need to decide is: Are we just going to put this race on autopilot, 'he's ahead, let him win, let's see what happens, how bad can it be?'" said the Trump ally turned Trump enemy.

Christie warned against giving in to such thinking; in fact, the entirety of the former U.S. Attorney's water-testing stump speech is The Case Against Trump. But in the very hour he was delivering that argument, Trump was on the opposite end of the Eastern Seaboard demonstrating how well-positioned he is at the moment.

Summoning the House members from Florida who've endorsed his candidacy to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, a troll of Ron DeSantis bearded as a toast to Trump, the former president used the dinner to deliberate over how much he should even compete in the Republican primary.