Trump backers speak out
GOPERS FIGHTING TRUMP FIND THEMSELVES ON THE OUTS
This week provided overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump is ensconced in the driver’s seat of the Republican party, steamrolling internal competition, making political casualties of his rare detractors.
Look no further than Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and John McCain.
All three senators spoke against the president, warning of his unfitness for office and if this was intended as a rallying cry of rebellion, it produced little more than silence, slings and arrows from their own side.
The reaction of two men was telling: Sen. Ted Cruz and radio host Mark Levin. Both reluctantly endorsed Trump last year, after initially refusing to. Now they’re acting as presidential enforcers, raining verbal blows upon Trump detractors.
Levin spent a solid half-hour trashing Corker for suggesting the president is mentally unstable and might cause a third world war. He called the senator “an egomaniac,” “repulsive,” a serial liar, detestable, a “creep,” “jerk,” “snake,” “lowest of the low,” “angry little man,” “loathsome,” and a “donothing, awful senator.”
The host’s basic point is Trump has achieved more for conservatives this year by signing executive orders on deregulation and appointing Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court than a do-nothing Congress that hasn’t passed a single major bill.
This same man initially refused to endorse Trump over slimy campaign attacks on Cruz — like insulting his wife, spreading rumours about his sex life and suggesting the Texas senator’s dad helped kill John F. Kennedy.
This week, Cruz sided with the president.
Appearing on a show where the host bragged about delivering “crotch-kicks” to the crybaby senators, Cruz reacted to his colleagues this way: “We’ve got a job to do, dammit. ... All of this nonsense, I’ve got nothing to say on it. Everyone shut up and do your job, is my view.”
Cruz blamed so-called moderate peers for blocking bills like the Obamacare repeal.
Those peers are now leaving: Corker isn’t seeking re-election next year. McCain, with five years left in his term, is battling brain cancer. Flake just announced his retirement after one term, conceding the obvious: he would probably have lost his primary.
He followed up his dramatic resignation address with an op-ed in newspapers Wednesday titled, “Enough.” Flake warned of a sickness in the political system and said people must speak up against Trump as they did against the red-baiting demagogue Joseph McCarthy.
“Nine months (of this administration) is more than enough for us to say, loudly and clearly: Enough,” Flake wrote. “We can no longer remain silent, merely observing this train wreck... The longer we wait, the greater the damage, the harsher the judgment of history.”