Wow, that was quick.

It took Sen. John McCain, the straight-talking maverick from Arizona, eight long years—between the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2008—to be transformed from media darling to media target. But for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the process was completed in a political nanosecond.

Less than two months after his landslide reelection, in which he beat Democratic opponent Barbara Buono by a 21-point margin, the Republican governor is undergoing the sort of media metamorphosis that sometimes befalls popular statewide politicians who dare to think of themselves as future presidents.

To paraphrase Franz Kafka, Christie awoke one morning last week and, reading the front page of The New York Times, discovered that he’d been changed into a giant bully. In his new media incarnation, he was suddenly a politician who wreaks petty revenge and humiliation on any poor soul who is unwise enough to cross him, and who countenanced the closure of two local access lanes of the George Washington Bridge, causing vehicular chaos for four days in Fort Lee, N.J., where the Democratic mayor had declined to endorse him.

This, for a public official who previously had been portrayed in the national media as a truth-telling, tough-talking executive who was willing to reach across the aisle to get things done.

Arguably worse, Double Down, a book about the 2012 campaign released in early November, just as Christie was racking up his 60-percent vote total, depicted the governor previously celebrated for uncompromising honesty as a possibly shady New Jersey pol who’d done lucrative backroom favors for political allies, lobbied for the business interests of Bernie Madoff and his ilk, lacked that ineffable quality called “presidential temperament,” and freely spent the taxpayer’s dime for his own personal aggrandizement, among other disturbing details reportedly uncovered by Mitt Romney’s vice presidential vetting team.

He was also, Romney’s vetters are said to have concluded, alarmingly obese—although the governor has been noticeably slimming down since his lap-band surgery in June.

The good news for Team Christie is that the media’s alterations on Christie’s portrait have yet to make a dent in his popularity among voters. The latest CNN poll has the governor running well ahead of other likely contenders for the 2016 Republican nomination, even beating Hillary Clinton by a sliver in a hypothetical head-to-head. That fact alone permits Christie loyalists to greet the new negativity with a healthy degree of sangfroid.

“The governor is not a complete stranger to intense scrutiny and coverage and is not surprised by it,” says a Christie aide, noting that the boss has had the national spotlight trained on him from the moment he campaigned for fellow Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections, through the endless speculation about his 2012 plans and his much-analyzed keynote speech to the GOP convention in Tampa. “The other thing he’s not surprised by is when media outlets and Democratic organizations make him a target.”

The Christie aide added: “When you’ve had success like he has had, there comes a degree of scrutiny and also attacks from outside forces with political motivations. The fact that there is already a greater degree of scrutiny isn’t a surprise either. The governor himself said recently, ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore.’ ”

Christie made his little quip, acknowledging the intrusion of presidential politics, during a news conference at which the bridge snafu was front and center. He was suspected but never quite implicated in the nasty business, and the smoking traffic cones were instead laid at the feet of Christie appointees who couldn’t be shown to have consulted the governor, let alone taken orders from him, before acting possibly on their own.

“It’s all a setup,” says Michael Steele, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee when Christie first ran for governor in 2009. “It plays itself out in a variety of ways, sometimes aided by the main target, sometimes by subordinates or opposition camps. There’s a tendency to reach that turning point so that the knives come out and the new narrative begins.”

In what amounts to Steele’s political-literary analysis, the current storyline began in November 2012, when Christie disappointed the Romney campaign and enraged fellow Republicans—but charmed the East Coast media establishment—by embracing President Obama in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. “The political leadership on the left, and even some on the right, were enamored of this man and his style and his ability to cut through the BS and tell it like it is,” Steele says. “How saucy, how sexy, how wonderful for politics!”