A prominent Republican senator doesn’t think anything about the Trump White House is right.
A prominent Republican senator doesn’t think anything about the Trump White House is right — and neither should his colleagues on either side of the aisle.
“To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties, ” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) wrote in an op-ed for Politico Magazine . “And tremendous powers of denial.”
Flake’s essay — excerpted from his new book, “Conscience of a Conservative, ” to be released Tuesday — argues that his own party was responsible for making Trump a national specter when it decided to vehemently oppose President Obama at every turn.
“It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us, ” he wrote.
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Now that Trump is President, Flake said, it’s up to congressional lawmakers to hold him accountable — particularly his tweeting habit that often causes national uproar.
While it might be easy to avoid addressing every tweet, Flake wrote, “it was also a monumental dodge. 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, if one is being honest, the flood becomes the thing that is most worthy of attention. At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark, ” wrote Flake, a first-term senator who spent 12 years in the House.
Flake’s essay comes amid continued White House shake-ups and the ongoing Russia probe.
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The Arizona lawmaker has criticized other Trump actions, notably his travel ban on residence of six Muslim-majority nations.
In his Politico op-ed, Flake says lawmakers need to stand up to Trump’s short-term fixes. He says the GOP has to have a better view on trade, that “populist and protectionist policies” can “handicap the country in the long term.”
And, he says, lawmakers need to protect Senate institutions like the filibuster rule, which Trump called to be abolished in a Saturday morning Twitter rant.
He regularly casts Trump as a dark force that’s taken over the White House, and a threat whose policies are good only in the short term.
Flake said it’s particularly troublesome that Trump has praised Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, while discrediting intelligence agencies’ consensus that Russia meddled in last year’s election “as a Democratic ruse and a hoax.”
“If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it, ” he argued, referencing the German folklore of an astronomer who sold his soul to the devil. “If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?”
