After announcing Tuesday afternoon that he will not run for re-election in 2018, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) on Wednesday morning described how Republican politics have changed in a way that made it impossible for him to win his primary.
“The bottom line is if I were to run a campaign that I can could be proud of and where I didn’t have to cozy up to the President and his positions or his behavior, I could not win in a Republican primary. That’s the bottom line. It’s not that you have just to be with the President on policy. You can’t question his behavior and still be a Republican in good standing, apparently, in a Republican primary,” Flake said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
The senator said that polls show that the most important issue to Republican primary voters is support for Trump.
“And they take any criticism of the President as somehow something that’s not conservative. And that’s what’s got to change,” Flake said.
Flake told MSNBC that he has suddenly become a RINO, a Republican In Name Only.
“Republicans have changed quite a bit, that’s all I can say,” he said.
He said that to win a Republican primary now, you have to be “angry” and to stand with Trump no matter what.
“The problem is, it seems now to be conservative you have to be angry. And it’s a different type of politics than we’re used to, you and me,” he told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman.
Flake said that this dynamic “may be more pronounced in Arizona than some other states, but it’s not unique.”
Watch Flake’s interview on “Morning Joe” via MSNBC:
Only if the rest of the GOP continues to suck up to the Mango Mussolini. Spineless wimps.
No, they havent. They were the same before, just more vocal now. I still recall “Either you are with us or you are the enemy”.
Republicans have for years undermined the democratic fabric of this country–the respect for reason, honesty, justice, the rule of law, the basic notion that the public should be served–and I despise every last one of them. Now we are supposed to celebrate a guy like Jeff Flake, even though by his own admission he would still be a professional criminal and political gangster if some other gang leader were in control of his party. That’s what this interview confirms: all his moaning about Trump basically comes down to the fact that Trumpism, which he devoted years of his life to enabling and promoting, has scuttled his political career. If this quitter and moaner had any convictions at all he would stand up to Kelli Ward and her gruesome band of Republican fascists. Sorry, not a drop of respect from this Democrat, not while so many people on our own side need every scrap of support they can get.
Someone should have asked him why he doesn’t run as an Independent.
In this current environment, the only voters who self-declare as Republican are the wingnut batshit crazies and the elderly who are too damn old to change their affiliation.
Flake’s true test will be whether or not he supports whoever Bannon picks as his successor candidate in next year’s AZ election for his seat. Of course he will, because party.