Corker’s blast at Trump wins quiet approval
For nearly nine months, Senate Republicans have watched their new president with a mix of aggravation and alarm. But it took Sen. Bob Corker to take those concerns public and confront President Donald Trump with his most serious challenge from within his own party.
In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Corker responded to a series of Twitter attacks on him by Trump. He said that the president was running the White House like it was “a reality show” and with bellicose threats that could set the nation “on the path to World War Three.” Corker added that “every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.”
In unloading on Trump, Corker, a two-term senator from Tennessee, said in public what many of his Republican colleagues say in private — that the president is dangerously erratic and unstable, that he treats his high post like a television show and that he is reckless enough to stumble the country into a nuclear war.
Corker, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, evidently feels liberated now that he has decided not to run for re-election, while other Republican senators with concerns keep quiet fearing the retaliation of a Twitter-armed president and his allies in the conservative media.
The president has already seen what can happen with a 52-vote Senate caucus that can be thwarted by the defection of just three Republicans. Until now, Corker has not been one of the renegades on those high-drama votes that killed Trump’s health-care legislation.
Charlie Sykes, a former conservative talk show host, told CNN on Sunday: “Guys like Bob Corker, I think, have reached the point where it’s like, ‘Can we not pretend the emperor is not naked?’”
As chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Corker could singlehandedly block the confirmation of a new secretary of state should Trump push out his embattled chief diplomat, Rex Tillerson, and he could bottle up appointments.