Chris Collins mimicked the president’s playbook. But his boorish, head-butting style couldn’t save him from prison
Collins made no friends as Erie County executive. His off-color commentaddress in 2010 led New York papers to run headlines such as “Collins’ Foot-in-Mouth Disease” and quips like “Chris Collins: Running his mouth like a business.”
His fiscal conservatism could curdle into a Scroogelike miserliness. In 2010, he dealt a blow to working mothers when, a cut that would reverberate into the next county executive’s term. As he searched for ways to trim the county budget, he took aim at small theaters, libraries and cultural organizations in the Buffalo area, slashing operational funding in the 2011 budget for all but 10 of the largest cultural groups in the county.
Collins delivered on his promises and they turned out to be his undoing. His defeat in the 2011 county election shocked him. He soon found hope, though, in New York’s 27th, a reliably conservative district that swept around the rural and suburban areas of Buffalo and Rochester. The district had recently flipped to Democratic control following another RepublicanDistrict is Trump country in miniature.
Collins had already begun cozying up to the Tea Party by that point, but he may have thrown his support behind Trump earlier than other Republicans because he saw a kindred spirit in another businessman.
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