Never Trump, Still a Republican

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Jeff Flake is something of a maverick in today’s Republican Party. He was an early and consistent critic of President Trump. In December 2015, when then-candidate Trump floated a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” the United States—a preview of what became his now-infamous executive order barring travel to the U.S. by people from several Muslim-majority countries—Flake, then a United States Senator from Arizona, immediately spoke up. The idea repulsed him. He made a visit to a mosque in Scottsdale days later to declare that what people were seeing from Trump on the campaign trail was not representative of America.

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“This was a difficult week in Washington—it wasn’t so much the legislative calendar as it was the rhetoric that came forth mostly from the presidential campaign,” Flake, who is a practicing Mormon, said. It was his first visit to a mosque. “That is not in keeping with the values and ideals that have made this country the shining city on the hill that it is.”

Trump went on to win that election. And Flake could no longer stomach the direction his party was headed. He would have been up for reelection in 2018 but decided against running again. As he told my colleague McKay Coppins at the time, he was not interested in the kind of campaign he’d had to have run to win—or even simply to secure Trump’s endorsement. In a memorable speech, Flake decried the deterioration of politics and called for America to look toward its better angels.

It’s been almost a decade since that speech and Trump’s hold over the Republican Party shows few signs of weakening any time soon. Meanwhile, Flake recently endorsed Jon Ossoff, the Democratic Senator from Georgia, in Ossoff’s reelection bid over the Trump-endorsed Representative Mike Collins. What does it mean to be a Republican when the party has moved away from the things it has historically claimed to stand for? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Flake joins me to discuss his endorsement, the Senate, and the party he hopes to reclaim.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: What does it mean to continue identifying with the party if it’s moved beyond the recognition of what it’s been in the past? Which is sort of to say, are you hanging on to a party that isn’t your party anymore?

Jeff Flake: That would be, you know, easy to say right now, but parties sometimes return as well. You see parties flirt with populism and then return, and I’m hopeful that that’s what you see now.

Harris: I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic, and this week, a conversation with former Republican U.S. Senator and Ambassador Jeff Flake. We talk about the state of the Republican Party, the Senate, and what it means to be principled in politics.

Flake is known for crossing party lines. Most recently, he endorsed Georgia’s Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff in his reelection campaign against Mike Collins. Collins, of course, is the Trump-endorsed Republican congressman from Georgia.

In announcing his endorsement, Flake told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that his decision boiled down to character, saying: “Character is more important. I’ve been around long enough to know you’ll disagree on issues with people across the aisle, or sometimes in your party. But the more important thing is character.”

In 2017, Flake delivered a fiery speech where he announced that he would not run for another term in office.

Flake: “There are times where we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.”

Harris: He believed the shift in the Republican party was temporary; he believed the fever would break.

But it’s been almost a decade since that speech. Does he still think that’s possible?

Ambassador Flake joins me now to discuss. Let’s get to questions.

Ambassador, thank you for joining me.

Flake: Hey, thanks for having me on.

Harris: What to you are the characteristics of a moral candidate, of a candidate with character?

Flake: Well, I want somebody who respects the institution of the Senate. And, you know, the Senate and senators have always very jealously guarded their prerogative to push back against any president from their own party or not. That’s just kind of been a hallmark of the Senate. You have six-year terms; you’re more independent; you have more rules than the House does in terms of advise and consent.

Then, too, I would fit in character as well. I have a hard time with people who simply won’t admit the obvious—one when your president loses an election and you’re afraid to tell him. That, I think, doesn’t speak well for character.

So yeah, in this case we have that problem as well. Senator Ossoff’s opponent, you know, simply won’t admit, and claims that President Trump won in Georgia and won the 2020 election. That doesn’t speak well for character. Also with character, it’s realizing in the Senate, too, with the special rules, the supermajority rules of filibuster, that you’re a legislator; you work across the aisle. And I’ve seen Senator Ossoff do that on a number of occasions sponsoring legislation. And then, constituent service as well. When I was ambassador in Turkey, I got calls from Jon Ossoff. I got to know him then because he was advocating on behalf of some of his constituents. So anyway, I’ve been impressed with him.

Harris: I have to reference the speech from the Senate floor in 2017, because it was such a succinct articulation of democratic values and principles. You argued in that speech that “anger and resentment is not a governing strategy,” and you took particular issue with your party’s acquiescence in that regard. How has that dynamic changed at all in the years since, for better or worse?

Flake: Unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten better in terms of my party and, you know, our willingness to stand up and actually govern. As I mentioned before, anger and grievance are not a governing philosophy, but we’ve just kind of fallen in and decided that whatever the president wants, whatever the party wants, that’s where we are. And that unfortunately has not changed much.

You see some people standing up when they’re not running for reelection anymore or have been defeated in a primary, but we need to stand up more. That’s why I like divided government.  You know, a fiscal conservative, I Iook back over the past few decades and the only time we’ve really had good fiscal discipline is when we’ve had divided government. Republicans in particular act more responsible and act more as fiscal conservatives when sometimes we’re in the minority.

Harris: Do you think there will be consequences for the fact that things haven’t gotten better? Do you think that there will be a migration away from the GOP?

Flake: I do, I do. You know, Donald Trump has led a charmed existence politically and he seems to be given a pass that others aren’t given. And if you look around, his imitators have not done well. In Georgia, they haven’t, and in Arizona, where I come from. Arizona is a very red state. We have more than 300,000, you know, more Republicans registered than Democrats.

But we have a Democrat in the governor’s office, two Democratic senators, Democrat secretary of state, and Democrat attorney general—all the elected statewide offices—because we’ve had people try to imitate the president and haven’t done well.

I do think that we’re gonna see a migration, and I’ve written about this, away from the president and his policies. And one, the president has been able to basically control any primary, Republican primary, across the country. That’s waning. And if a president leaves office or is in the last two years of his term, if his policies are really popular, that still lends him power that he wouldn’t otherwise have as a lame duck. But the president’s policies have not done well, in particular, you know, tariff policies, protectionist policies, have led to high inflation, and then also couple that with a war that’s been not popular at all and so, yeah, I think you’re seeing a migration now that, you know—filing deadlines have passed, most primaries have passed, and we’re into the midterm general. And then beyond the midterms, you’ll really see that happening.

Harris: I should ask, do you still identify as a Republican?

Flake: I do, I do. I’m still a registered Republican, and I’m hoping that the party returns to its previous kind of tenets of limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, strong American leadership abroad. And I do think that we’re gonna see a return to that. And I think you saw in the Senate, for example, the other day a vote on Russian sanctions. That is a bit of a proxy vote, support for Ukraine but also a support for American leadership, and support for NATO, and support for kind of the old bicameral consensus on foreign policy. So I think you see in elected officials a desire to go back to that, but it’s been very difficult when the president has had such a hold on the party base.

Harris: What does it mean to continue identifying with the party if it’s moved beyond the recognition of what it’s been in the past? Which is sort of to say, are you hanging on to a party that isn’t your party anymore?

Flake: Well that would be easy to say right now, but like I say, parties sometimes return as well. You see parties flirt with populism and then return.

We’re in unfamiliar territory right now, and I think we’re going to be migrating back to more familiar ground. And I do think that that’s where the country really is. I think we’re a center-right country. But the problem right now is, you know, you only have a subset of a subset of a subset that votes in Republican primaries. You have a similar issue on the Democratic side, not as pronounced perhaps, but that just puts all the political incentives to drive to the extremes. But I don’t think that’s where the country is.

That’s why one thing that really excites me about people like Jon Ossoff is I think that they can move the Democratic Party more to its, more to the center, and that would force Republicans to then contest that ground as well. As long as we have Democrats, you know, all the energy on the far progressive side, it allows Republicans to be extreme as well and still be seen as less extreme, I guess.

Harris: Well, actually, I wanted to stick with that for a second, because you’ve said there’s this sort of massive lane in the middle, that most people identify as politically in the middle, but Democratic voters in recent primaries have shown that that’s not exactly where they are either, right? There’s been this feeling that things are broken in part because of some of the middle-ground solutions, right? They’re part of what has led us to this moment where you see candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan winning the Democratic primary. So, I guess, what does success from the left wing of the Democratic Party tell us about what Americans actually might want right now?

Flake: Yeah, well I think it just proves the point I made before, that when you’re looking at primaries, although there was increased turnout, certainly in Michigan, it’s still a subset of a subset that are determining who the nominee is. And I do think the Democrats in Michigan would have been far better off by, you know, going a different direction. I think they would have had that general election easily. Now it’ll be more difficult, certainly. But I do think, yeah, the same problem is on both sides. I think without a polarizing figure like Donald Trump, who certainly controls primaries on the right and causes Democrats to act in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise. I see people like Gavin Newsom using foul and crude language just because the president does and he wants to match it. And you see that phenomenon all over, and it’s not not been good for politics. I hope we can move away from it. But that’s gonna require leadership. That’s why, in particular I appreciate Jon Ossoff, who’s more of a serious candidate and doesn’t kind of follow that.

Harris: Thinking about that speech from 2017, and where we’ve come since then, right, it’s been roughly a decade. All three branches of government right now have really abysmal approval ratings. People’s trust in institutions is flagging, and you said that the spell will eventually break, right? Once there’s no longer a Trump, we can return to ourselves once more. It seems that you’re still of that belief that the fever is going to break. What are you seeing that gives you that hope that the fever’s going to break?

Flake: Well, it’s been one heck of a fever. It’s been a long time in coming. Well, one, let me just say, I was back in Washington for Lindsey Graham’s funeral last week, and I came away from that believing that, like I’ve said, that this fever will break.

One, I saw Democrats and Republicans. Lindsey was an interesting figure, but if nothing else, he certainly had friends on the Democratic side. I was with him on a lot of those issues on immigration reform in particular and a lot of the foreign-policy issues. And you saw people from all political stripes come out and celebrate a man’s life that way. That made me feel good. At the same time, you had Senators [John] Cornyn and [Thom] Tillis standing up—albeit they’re not staying in Washington after January—but hey, it’s still something to actually stand up to the president and see the Senate acting more like the Senate again.

And I see John Thune keeping some of his members at bay who want to make institutional changes, like getting rid of the filibuster, which would fundamentally change the Senate into a more partisan body than it already is. But I came away from this week even more firmly believing that, you know, this fever will break. And when you look around the country as well, I still think you see that phenomenon that the president’s imitators don’t do as well as he does. So I’m hopeful that that fever will break.

Harris: But you’ve written, right, that we’ve seen folks in the past, lawmakers, the country generally, come together after death or after a tragedy? Two of which you experienced at the congressional baseball practice as well as standing with Representative [Gabby] Giffords at the State of the Union.

But that quickly fades away, and people sort of divide again. Do you think that even if we do heal that there will be that division again?

Flake: Yeah, well, I think you’ve had a lot of people elected, particularly in the last several cycles, who haven’t really been in Washington when there’s been so-called regular order, or, you know, what we’re used to. So it’s gonna be difficult. You’ll always have those voices, and we have a media environment that’s not going back to the way it was before, where there are just a few trusted sources of information. It’s more distributed that way. So it’s more difficult to go back to the way it was. But that’s why it’s going to require real leadership. And leadership is important. We’ve seen that, because the man in the White House now, he’s certainly been effective in where he’s wanted to go and getting people on his side more out of fear of losing primaries. But, by the same token, you’re going to have leaders that actually inspire people, better angels of our nature, and that’s what I’m hoping to see in this next presidential election is people on both the Republican and the Democratic side who will appeal to people’s better angels. And if they do, I think we can get to a better place. It’s gonna be more difficult moving ahead, like I said, just because of the media environment, but it’s not impossible.

Harris: Well, ambassador, we’ll have to leave it there. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Flake: Thanks for having me on.

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