04 August, 2017
Flake, a longtime critic of President Trump, has written a book detailing where he thinks his party has gone wrong.
On Trump's penchant for conflict: "Far from conservative, the president's comportment was rather a study in the importance of conflict in reality television - that once you introduce conflict, you can not de-escalate conflict".
"I think we ought to acknowledge that we can come back to health care afterward, but we need to move ahead on tax reform", Hatch said. Jeff Flake sets aside the kind of muted complaints and pleas for civility that we've heard to date from GOP lawmakers, instead lambasting Trump directly as volatile and unprincipled. His approval ratings are in the gutter, and the White House is recruiting primary challengers to take him out. Jeff Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona, berated his fellow members of Congress for an "unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch".
This is exactly the siren call Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have been looking for from Congress' so-called "principled conservatives".
The Arizona lawmaker has criticized other Trump actions, notably his travel ban on residence of six Muslim-majority nations. But Flake voted to confirm Robert Lighthizer, Trump's nominee to be the United States Trade Representative.
Well, liberals, here's one Republican who seems ready to agree with you that, at the very least, Trump is not a normal president deserving of normal treatment from his own party. Sen.
"To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties". "And tremendous powers of denial".
Flake cited a Washington Post column by conservative writer Michael Gerson, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, who wrote in May that the "conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased" and had "with the blessings of a president.abandoned the normal constraints of reasons and compassion".
Which is true. So often, when I break down with legal scholars whether something Trump or his team did crosses a legal line, their answer is: Maybe, but it's an open question whether you can prosecute a sitting president.
"I think certainly the modern media culture values those who yell the loudest", Flake said.
Flake also took issue with Trump's "comportment" in office. Trump could be increasing the odds of an impeachment effort by inserting himself into everything related to Russian Federation. "It would be like Noah saying, 'If I spent all my time obsessing about the coming flood, there would be little time for anything else'". "At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark".
It's not all that surprising that Flake is the GOP voice speaking out against Trump in this way.
