Corker not ready to endorse Trump for re-election
U.S. Sen. Bob Corker this week said he is not ready to endorse President Donald Trump if he were to run for re-election, noting it’s unclear if the president will run again.
In an interview with CNN on Thursday morning, the former Chattanooga mayor avoided answering the question directly.
“I have no idea who’s going to run for president in 2020, and I am not about to say who I will support for that,” he said.
Corker, R-Tenn., also said many GOP members of Congress are conflicted over the president.
“Any Republican senator that hasn’t been conflicted over this presidency is either comatose or is pretty useless in their blindness,” Corker said Wednesday at a breakfast, according to The Hill. “… We’ve got some of both, of course — not many.”
At the same event, Corker described his relationship with Trump as “warm” and called him “very accessible, more accessible than any president probably in the history of the world.”
Earlier this week, the retiring senator was the subject of a lengthy profile in The Washington Post that centered on his struggle to answer the same question he avoided answering on CNN: “If the election were held today, would you vote for Donald Trump?”
The question bookended the piece, eventually ending with Corker calling the reporter four days later with his final answer: “I just don’t have any desire to make news,” he said. “So I’ll leave it at that.”
That was Tuesday.
It’s not the first time the senator has made waves with his criticism of the president. In August 2017, he told the Rotary Club of Chattanooga that Trump “has not demonstrated that he understands the character of the nation” and often “doubles down to try to make a wrong a right,” including some of the president’s comments following the killing of a woman protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
A short time later, Trump fired back on Twitter: “Strange statement by Bob Corker considering that he is constantly asking me whether or not he should run again in ’18. Tennessee not happy!”
Later in October, the two were involved in a Twitter feud after Corker criticized Trump and the GOP tax reform efforts.
That prompted an angry Twitter response from the president, who said, “Bob Corker, who helped President O give us the bad Iran Deal & couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee, is now fighting Tax Cuts … ”
Corker took to his own Twitter account to respond: “Same untruths from an utterly untruthful president. #AlertTheDaycareStaff.” Trump then called Corker “lightweight.”
Though the senator continues to speak out, the two since have patched things up, CNN reported. As of Thursday afternoon, the president had not responded to Corker’s most recent comments.