Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz) has never been among Donald Trump’s biggest supporters. He and the president have long traded barbs, and earlier this month, it was reported that the White House was recruiting primary challengers to take on the senator. But Flake just took the feud it to a bold new level with an op-ed in Politico Magazine:
“If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. 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?
“Meanwhile, the strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians created such a cognitive dissonance among my generation of conservatives—who had come of age under existential threat from the Soviet Union—that it was almost impossible to believe. Even as our own government was documenting a concerted attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck.”
The column was described by Commentary‘s Noah Rothman as “an extinction level event.”
This comes the day before the release of Flake’s book, Conscience of a Conservative. Read the full op-ed here.
