POLITICAL FIGURES/POLITICS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Before Bob Corker, there was Jeff Flake.
Mr. Flake, the even-tempered Republican senator from Arizona, has for months offered stinging critiques of President Trump’s character, demeanor and truthfulness — the same message forcefully echoed a week ago by Mr. Corker, a Republican colleague from Tennessee, who warned that Mr. Trump’s reckless behavior could lead to ‘World War III.’
But there is one crucial difference between the two: Mr. Flake, unlike Mr. Corker, is running for re-election. And now he finds himself in grave political peril.
Mr. Flake is perhaps the most endangered Senate Republican, with an approval rating in one recent poll of just 18 percent among Arizonans. Mr. Trump has savaged Mr. Flake as ‘toxic’ and a ‘flake,’ and has encouraged a primary challenge against him that has left the senator squeezed not only from the left but also the right.
His fate is an object lesson for other Republicans who might consider voicing dire thoughts about the president’s fitness: Cross Mr. Trump, and your political career could well be over.
Mr. Flake, who is known more for his decency than his independent streak, said he had no regrets.
In an interview here, he ticked off some of his earliest criticisms of the president — from the days when Mr. Trump peddled the false theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, to the time Mr. Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as ‘rapists,’ to his call for a complete ban on travel to the United States by Muslims — before looking up and stopping himself.”
-Sheryl Gay Stolberberg, “Jeff Flake’s Lesson for Republicans: Cross Trump at Your Own Risk,” The New York Times online, Oct. 15, 2017