The Lonely War of Bob Corker
OCT. 10 2017 6:28 PM
The retiring senator says most Republicans share his Trump criticism. Too bad they won’t back him up.
By Jim Newell
You don’t need retiring Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker to tell you the president is a madman, that “every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.” You also don’t need Corker to tell you that the “vast majority of” the Senate Republican caucus “understands what we’re dealing with here,” that they “understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.” The vast majority of the Senate Republican caucus has the same eyes and ears that you do.
And yet it felt refreshing to hear Corker admit it. It would feel even more refreshing to hear more members of that “vast majority,” the ones who aren’t as unshackled as lame-duck Corker, do the same—but this won’t happen anytime soon. For one, what would it do? It wouldn’t serve as a wake-up call to the president to change his ways. Donald Trump does not change. What it could do, though, is ensure that any Republicans who speak up are term-limited after all, involuntarily.
For Steve Bannon, who said on leaving the White House, “I’ve got my hands back on my weapons,” Corker’s comments about the “vast majority” of Senate Republicans were the highlight of his week. He can and will use them as a Trumpist wedge against the Republican “establishment,” which has just become shorthand for moderately well-adjusted Republicans in government. Most voters—those outside the GOP base—would rightly be scared for their country on hearing a Republican senator say that most of his Republican colleagues believe the Republican president is unstable enough to provoke “World War III.” But most voters don’t vote in GOP primaries. And the message Bannon is selling to those who do is that this “vast majority” of senators needs to go.
“This is what they think about President Trump behind closed doors,” Bannon Link to tweet
" target="_blank">said on Fox News Monday night. “The buried lede was that there’s only two or three senators on Capitol Hill that have President Trump’s back.” And just like that, Bannon converted Corker’s comments into ammunition for his ongoing efforts to primary incumbent senators—a target list, by the way, that has grown to include all Republican senators up for re-election save for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (a funny exemption, given that Cruz once delivered the most vicious attack on Trump that any sitting Republican politician has ever delivered).
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/10/sen_bob_corker_is_battling_with_trump_alone.html
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