OUTSPOKEN TRUMP CRITIC FACES FIGHT
His fate is an object lesson for other Republicans who might consider voicing dire thoughts about the president’s fitness: Cross Trump, and your political career could well be over.
Flake, a Mormon known more for his decency than his independent streak, said he had no regrets.
In an interview here, he ticked off some of his earliest criticisms of the president — from the days when Trump peddled the false theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, to the time Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” to his call for a complete ban on travel to the United States by Muslims — before looking up and stopping himself.
“In which of those instances,” the senator asked, “should I not have spoken out? At what point should you not stand up and say, ‘This is not right; this is not conservative; this is not where Republicans ought to be?’”
Flake said he had known from the start that taking on Trump might do him political harm. Even before he declared the president’s brand of populism a corruption of conservative values, he anticipated a tough primary challenge, given his policy differences with Trump on issues like immigration, trade and Cuba.
“The truth is, if my only goal were to be elected, re-elected to mark time in the Senate, there are much easier paths,” he said.
Flake is not the Senate’s only vulnerable Republican; Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada is also facing a tough re-election race. And Republicans will have to field a candidate to succeed Corker, who announced late last month that he was not running next year.
Last weekend, Corker said his concerns about Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican, even if few have spoken out. Flake, by contrast, has put pen to paper with his criticism; his new book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” published in August, is a blistering indictment of the Republican Party and of a president who, despite recordlow overall approval ratings, has retained the support of about 80 percent of his party.
Flake’s main primary challenger at the moment, Kelli Ward, made clear in an interview that she intended to paint Flake as “an obstructionist to the America First agenda that Donald Trump touted on the campaign trail, and that the American people want to see enacted.”
Ward, an osteopathic physician and a former state senator who ran unsuccessfully against Arizona’s other senator, John Mccain, in 2016, was busy preparing last week for her campaign kickoff. It is scheduled for Tuesday night with the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham as the featured guest.
Andy Surabian, senior adviser to the Great America Alliance, a Trump-aligned group whose political action committee has been supportive of Ward, said Flake’s troubles were “entirely self-inflicted.”
“If Flake wants to know why he’s vulnerable, all he needs to do is look in the mirror,” said Surabian, who had a stint in the White House as deputy to Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. He added: “No one told him to go out and be the face of the antitrump resistance in the Republican Party. No one told him to go out and write a book that was basically an anti-trump screed. The reason the race is in play is because of Jeff Flake’s actions.”
Flake is pro-immigration and favors free trade — stances that put him at philosophical odds not only with the president, but also with many Arizonans. In 2013, he was part of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” group of senators who put forth an immigration overhaul that would have offered immigrants in the country illegally a path to citizenship. It passed the Senate with 68 votes but died in the House. He also worked closely with Obama to open relations with Cuba.
Ward, his Republican challenger, is aligned more closely with Trump, though her critics in the party have portrayed her as a fringe candidate, and Trump, while praising her on Twitter, has not given her an explicit endorsement. Bannon, who has declared “war” on establishment Republicans, is said to be hunting for stronger candidates than Ward to take on Flake.
If Flake survives his primary — a big if, many Republicans here say — he will have to worry about his left flank: Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, a centrist Democrat with a powerful biography, recently announced that she would seek Flake’s seat.
Rodd Mcleod, a Democratic strategist here, said Sinema’s entry into the race would make it more difficult for Flake — who has a firmly conservative voting record, though his mild temperament can make him seem more moderate — to appeal to swing voters.
“You’ve got a situation now where the swing constituency, independent women, are looking at this guy and saying, ‘He’s real right wing,’ and then you’ve got the right-wing voters saying he hasn’t been respectful enough to Trump,” Mcleod said. “And the liberal base is fired up, and they can turn out in big numbers.”
Indeed, each Friday at noon in the sweltering Arizona heat, a group calling itself “Stand for Sane Government” pickets Flake’s office here.
The Flakes are a political family — the senator’s father was once mayor of Snowflake — and Flake ran a libertarian think tank, the Goldwater Institute, named for the deeply conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, before being elected to the House in 2000.
In his early years in Congress, he developed a reputation as a budget hawk who challenged party leaders to get rid of earmarks, in which federal money is steered to lawmakers’ pet projects. But in the Senate, which he joined in 2013, Flake has not carved out much of a reputation, other than for being a nice guy.
“He’s going to have to define who he is, what his record is and what he’s accomplished,” said David Winston, a Republican strategist in Washington. “This is really going to be a vote about him and his incumbency.”