GOP senator smacks back at president
Corker calls White House ‘adult day care center’
WASHINGTON – A senior Republican senator publicly expressed on Sunday what party leaders mostly have whispered, calling the White House “an adult day care center” in a caustic reply to President Donald Trump’s weekend of tweets and offthe-cuff comments attacking the senator and other targets.
The Twitter exchange between the president and Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee captured the degree of disruption that Trump has brought to the Republican Party. And it put his agenda perhaps further at risk in a Senate, where Republicans have just a two-vote margin of control, as they gird to battle over signature issues such as tax reform.
Trump took the first shot, in a series of tweets before he left the White House for his golf club in Virginia.
“Didn’t have the guts to run!” Trump said of Corker, who announced last month he would not seek re-election. Trump claimed that the Tennessee Republican, who has been in the Senate since 2007, had “begged” for his endorsement before dropping out of the race.
“He also wanted to be Secretary of State,” the president wrote. “I said ‘NO THANKS.’ ”
Trump castigated Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as “largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal,” referring to the landmark 2015 accord between Tehran and six world powers, including the United States, to block Iran’s nuclear arms development.
The president, who vowed to abandon the deal as a candidate, is expected in the coming week to decertify the pact, putting the onus on Congress to decide whether to reimpose sanctions.
Trump said he expected Corker to be a “negative voice and stand in the way of our great agenda.”
It was perhaps the most incendiary of a weekend of presidential outbursts about North Korea, Democrats, disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and professional football players. Corker’s response was short and sharp.
“It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center,” he wrote. “Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”
Corker’s chief of staff, Todd Womack, issued a statement contesting factual elements of Trump’s tweets. Womack said the president sought to dissuade the senator — a campaign supporter and, early on, a formidable legislative ally — from retiring, and volunteered more than once that he would endorse the senator.
The discord between the two flared into the open last week, when Corker praised several of Trump’s senior advisers for helping to stave off “chaos.” He made it clear that he meant chaos caused by the president.
“I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis and chief of staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos,”
the senator said on Wednesday, referring to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House chief of staff John Kelly.
The president’s recent defeat on health care puts even more importance on the president’s proposed tax overhaul. Yet Corker recently served notice that he will not back a tax plan that adds one penny to federal deficits.
The president started on Twitter early Saturday with a post confirming that he’d been in touch with the Senate Democratic leader to gauge interest in a health care deal.
Yet Trump made clear that he insists on repealing the Affordable Care Act, not fixing it, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was quick with a statement that repeal is “off the table.”
In comments to reporters on Saturday, Trump also took a swipe at Weinstein, saying he was “not at all surprised” by reports in the New York Times that the movie producer and Democratic donor repeatedly paid to settle charges of sexual harassment.
When a reporter noted that Trump was commenting on the anniversary of last year’s preelection release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape from 2005, in which he bragged in vulgar terms about assaulting women by grabbing them by the genitals, Trump dismissed the allegations against him as “locker room talk.”
Trump returned to Twitter late Sunday, tweeting, “Nobody could have done what I’ve done for #PuertoRico with so little appreciation. So much work!”