And yet it’s hard not to notice in Corker’s comments how what should be a forthright discussion over Trump’s fitness for office has been so bizarrely warped by politics.
That is: Though many Republicans who
aren’t currently in elected office have publicly asked tough questions about Trump’s basic stability and competence, very few in the GOP who actually hold elected office have decided to do so.
Corker’s own evolution is a case in point.
During the presidential campaign,
Corker campaigned with Trump and spoke positively of him. And even through much of this year — as he considered whether to run for reelection in 2018 — he tended to avoid criticizing the president too much.
Only in the wake of controversy over Trump’s response to a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August did Corker begin to take a harsher line. “The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful,” the senator
said after that.
Finally, in late September — facing a possible primary challenge from the right — Corker announced that he would retire. And since then, he’s been more vocal in his criticism of Trump. He
said this month that he believed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and Chief of Staff John Kelly were three officials “that help separate our country from chaos,” in contrast to unnamed others in the Trump administration. And now there’s this new exchange.
The sympathetic interpretation of his behavior is that up until now Corker has been playing an inside game, trying to use his influence to steer the administration in a more productive direction, and that he has only now concluded that this inside game has failed and he has to go public with his concerns.
The more critical interpretation is that up to this point, Corker willingly ignored danger signs about Trump that were evident to basically everyone during the campaign, pulling his punches in part because he was afraid of angering Republican voters in case he decided to run again.
Indeed, perhaps the most striking comment Corker made to the Times is that “the vast majority” of his fellow Republican senators understand “what we’re dealing with here” — because you sure wouldn’t know it from their public comments.
It’s long been clear that the more concerned with reëlection Republicans are, the less appetite they seem to have for criticizing Trump in any way. The reason is obvious — Trump remains quite popular among GOP voters, and any electoral official criticizing him risks drawing a pro-Trump primary challenger.
For instance, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who wrote a book criticizing Trump this year, is performing dismally in primary polls. And with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon preparing to back a slate of GOP primary challengers, it’s becoming more and more difficult to see Republicans critical of Trump having a future in GOP politics.
Additionally, Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, responsible for retaining Republican majorities in Congress, have attempted to avoid conflict with the president this year, and to work with him rather than criticize him.
It certainly is inconvenient for Republicans who genuinely want conservative judges appointed, tax cuts passed, and continued GOP electoral wins to put all that at risk by admitting that their president could be dangerously unstable.
But if they do in fact hold these concerns, a conversation needs to ensue about what they propose to do about it — and that conversation needs to happen in public.
Because as of right now, the best idea Bob Corker has — to essentially hope that Trump’s advisers continue to rein him in — isn’t particularly comforting.
Dan Merica / CNN:
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