In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser describes meeting Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is retiring at the end of this term, at Senator John McCain’s funeral:
A few minutes after the service, when the talking and singing was over and the bipartisan establishment flowed back into the humid swamp outside the cathedral, I ran into Jeff Flake, McCain’s fellow-senator from Arizona and, like McCain, one of Trump’s few remaining public critics among Republicans on Capitol Hill. “The fever will break eventually,” Flake said. “It has to.” It was an oddly optimistic thing to say at a funeral, and, when he said it, it hardly sounded convincing.
Senator Flake, your analogy should acknowledge the role the body’s immune system, in particular the antibodies that neutralize pathogens, plays in breaking that fever. You, sir, should have considered yourself one of those antibodies and helped lead the Republican resistance to President Trump.
Instead, you’ve chosen to retire just because you were facing a tough challenge in the primaries. Those primaries were your chance to stand on a stage in front of your fellow Arizonans and articulate why your vision of the Republican Party is superior to that of President Trump’s and his fellow extremists. Being a Senator may mean working with others, but it also carries the responsibility of being a leader when the requirement arises.
As it stands, you sound desperate more than confident, a bystander who doesn’t understand what is happening, or how to fix it. And that’s a sad thing to say about a politician and his political party.
