Is There Room for Jeff Flake in Donald Trump’s GOP?

As Flake discusses capital and labor, as well as immigration, tax, and education policy, he sounds like a traditional free-market conservative ready and willing to embrace a new economy, a new Arizona even. “We should staple a green card to every diploma that our U.S. universities offer to foreign students in STEM fields, so I introduced the STAPLE Act, which did precisely that,” Flake says at one point, referring to legislation he introduced in 2011.

The crowd is well-dressed, attractive, young, and on the upper end of the income scale, judging by the number of luxury cars in the parking lot. Others on stage that evening spoke in reverent tones about a future of self-driving cars, 5G Internet, and technology we haven’t even dreamed of yet. The only hint of political incorrectness comes after Flake has left the room and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the evening’s headline speaker, rides a standing Segway-like scooter to take the stage and then tells a joke about four Mexicans. (“What do you call four Mexicans in quicksand?” Wozniak asked in the middle of his interview. “Cuatro sinko.”)

The only problem for Flake is that embracing the new economy and rubbing elbows with venture capitalists, tech titans, and yuppies isn’t the way to fit into the new Republican party—the party of Trump, populism, and nationalism.

Five nights later, Flake’s Trumpist primary challenger, Kelli Ward, held her campaign kickoff event with talk-radio host Laura Ingraham and Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, who has vowed to wage a war on congressional Republicans. “Jeff Flake was for the Gang of Eight amnesty bill,” Ingraham told the crowd. She trashed free trade deals and argued that populism is simply about “returning power to the people,” adding that “Jeff Flake doesn’t trust you, and I think probably in his gut he doesn’t like you.”

“There’s a revolt going on from Alabama to Arizona,” Bannon told the crowd gathered at the Hilton Scottsdale Resort & Villas. “This movement is working-class and middle-class people standing up against a permanent political class of global elitists.” Ward, a former state senator who practices osteopathy, said she would make Arizona and America great again by serving in the Senate “as a conservative, as a populist, as an Americanist, as a scurrilous nationalist.” (In a speech the day before the Ward campaign kickoff, John McCain, Arizona’s senior senator, denounced “spurious nationalism.”)

Five short years ago, Flake cruised to victory in his first GOP Senate primary with nearly 70 percent of the vote. Known in the House of Representatives as a budget hawk who bucked congressional leaders and President George W. Bush by opposing earmarks, No Child Left Behind, and Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit, Flake had the backing of then-senator Jim DeMint, the most influential patron of Tea Party insurgents. “Jeff Flake is one of the strongest conservative leaders in Congress,” DeMint said in his 2012 endorsement. “Nobody has done more to advance the cause of freedom than Jeff Flake. Nobody.”

DeMint’s insurgency was best summed up by his comment before the 2010 midterm elections that he’d “rather have 40 Marco Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters” in the Senate. (Specter, a liberal Republican till then, had joined the Democratic party in 2009 rather than face a conservative challenger.) “If you want 60 Republicans, you’ve got to have at least 40 to start with who stand on principle,” DeMint explained. But the insurgents of 2010 are now the elitist establishmentarians of 2017. At least that’s how it appears to the likes of Steve Bannon, who thinks Flake, particularly in his criticism of President Trump, is standing on the wrong principles. The Bannon motto seems to be that he’d rather have 40 Kelli Wards than 60 Jeff Flakes in the Senate.

The Happy Globalist

Flake is now in the political fight of his life, trailing Ward by double digits in several polls. With 10 months until the primary, there’s plenty of time to turn things around, but that’s a very bad place for any incumbent to start. The Arizona Senate race matters not only for what it says about the state and future of the Republican party in Arizona and the country, it’s also key to Republicans’ maintaining control of the Senate, where they now have a 52-48 majority.

But if you spend a few minutes talking to Flake or reading his August book, Conscience of a Conservative, it’s clear Flake has no interest in winning reelection by pretending to be someone he’s not. When I ask him after the tech summit on October 12 whether immigration reduces the wages of some Americans, Flake is blunt: “We need more robust legal immigration, and we need significant temporary worker programs, more than we have, to account for the labor shortages that we have, particularly in the high-tech area.” He writes in his book that he remains “very proud” of his participation in the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill that passed the Senate in 2013, divided the Republican party, and died in the House.

Flake grew up in a large Mormon family in northern Arizona on a cattle ranch. The work—castrating bull calves and branding cattle—was hard and dangerous. Flake had the tip of his index finger chopped off by machinery. He recalls in his book that when a Border Patrol plane could be heard coming toward the ranch, he’d sometimes jump on a horse and ride away from illegal migrant workers to serve as a decoy. “Growing up with migrant workers, I knew that they usually worked harder than we did,” Flake writes. When his friends from school were hired, they “would last maybe a day or two and were often unreliable.”

The former ranch-hand went on to serve as executive director of the libertarian Goldwater Institute and now happily embraces the “globalist” epithet. Recalling a 2012 blog post that said he had “been seen in the company of globalists in Paris, France,” Flake writes: “Quel scandale! Globalist as opposed to what, exactly? A provincialist? A parochialist? .  .  . [I]f we don’t trade, we don’t grow. Given the alternatives, I’ll take the globalist moniker, thank you.”

By page 96, it’s abundantly clear that Flake’s Conscience of a Conservative is sincere and not some too-clever-by-half campaign strategy. After defending his vote against the very popular Medicare prescription-drug benefit—Flake says he dared House whip Tom DeLay to make him the deciding vote to kill it—he expresses regret for having opposed the politically toxic 2008 bank bailout. “Better known as TARP, no bigger waste of taxpayer money had ever been conceived in the history of the republic—unless you counted the many multiples of that sum that Washington might end up shelling out if the bailout bill failed,” he writes. “TARP was actually a modest price to pay to forestall a global depression.” Flake calls his vote “more an act of cowardice than conscience.”

“If I was to write a book about how to be reelected, I could write that book, I could follow that formula. But to what end?” Flake said on October 12. “If you’re just there to mark time, to go with the flow, and to do what you need just to be reelected without taking a stand, it’s not worth it.”

Flake’s short book is about what he sees as a crisis of conservatism, which, in his telling, is a crisis of principle and policy as well as character and temperament. “Being conservative isn’t just holding conservative views. It’s being conservative in comportment and demeanor,” Flake said. The crisis may have come to a head with Donald Trump, but it did not begin with him. Flake blames cynical partisanship and gamesmanship and the failure of both parties to deliver on their promises for the rise of Trump.

Even in his criticism of Trump, Flake tries to be thoughtful and nuanced. He opens his book by contrasting Nixon’s “madman theory”—encouraging foreign adversaries to think the president is erratic—with his conclusion that the current president actually has impulse-control problems. “Erratic behavior, unmoored from principle, is the opposite of conservatism,” Flake writes. He seems ready to tee off on the president, but cites as an example of Trump’s erratic behavior his upsetting the “One China” policy by taking a congratulatory call from the president of Taiwan after being elected. Flake notes that the “sky didn’t fall” after the call, but points out presidential volatility regarding China is a problem. “Of course, I could be wrong,” he adds, words not usually uttered by a politician.

One of the book’s biggest weaknesses is Flake’s inability to see that his own ideology, in which free-market economics holds primacy, is just one strain of thought within the broader conservative movement and Republican party. Flake writes approvingly of Friedrich Hayek: “For Hayek, the economy wasn’t just another in a list of issues that citizens considered and politicians exploited; the economy was all-encompassing, the whole shooting match. It was that to which all other ‘issues’ are subsumed.” Flake’s own writings elsewhere in the book demonstrate that economic liberty is not the whole shooting match. Economic liberty has little to say about the importance of decency, honor, and morality. It does not guarantee freedom of religion or necessarily make the people of one nation want to be a beacon of liberty for people around the world. As Flake notes later in the book, when Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis was asked in May 2017 what worried him most, Mattis told the New Yorker: “The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.”

‘That’s not our party’

It would be a mistake to view Flake’s current primary predicament as just an ideological one. After all, fellow Gang of Eight member, free trader, and Arizona senator John McCain fended off a primary challenge from Kelli Ward in August 2016, defeating her 52 percent to 39 percent.

There are of course some important differences between McCain and Flake. McCain is a war hero and former POW who served as his party’s presidential nominee and is now in his sixth term in the Senate. Flake is a former head of a libertarian think tank who went on to serve in the House for 12 years before being elected to the Senate.

And for all of the antagonism between John McCain and Donald (“I like people who weren’t captured”) Trump, at the time of the August 2016 primary, McCain still supported the presidential “nominee of my party.” (McCain, along with many other elected Republicans, announced he wouldn’t vote for Trump after the Access Hollywood video was released in which Trump bragged about his uninvited kissing and groping of women.) With the exception of Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, no other elected Republican is defined more by his opposition to Trump than Flake.

In Trump’s first meeting with congressional Republicans after wrapping up the GOP nomination in 2016, he immediately recognized Flake. “You’ve been very critical of me,” Trump said, according to Flake. “Yes, I’m the other senator from Arizona—the one who didn’t get captured—and I want to talk to you about statements like that,” Flake replied, before asking about Trump’s comment that Mexico was sending rapists to the United States. Flake writes that Trump brushed off the question and told Flake he was going to lose reelection. “I had to inform him that I wasn’t on the fall ballot,” Flake writes. Trump may have just been off by two years.

Flake is more than willing to credit Trump for his achievements. “The appointment of Neil Gorsuch was stellar,” he says, before rattling off a list of executive actions he supports, including Trump’s recent one on Obamacare. Flake points out he’s voted for every Obamacare repeal bill that’s come up. “I work with the president when I believe he’s right, I oppose him when I think he’s wrong,” he says. “That’s what I’ve done with every president, Democrat or Republican.”

But Flake understandably makes much more news when he criticizes Trump or Republicans. Take, for example, his criticism of Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore. When asked about a 2006 op-ed in which Moore argued that the first Muslim elected to Congress should be denied his seat because he’s a Muslim, Flake told the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins: “I think that when we disagree with something so fundamental like that, we ought to stand up and say, that’s not right, that’s not our party, that is not us.” A few days later, Flake spoke out on the Senate floor against Democratic colleagues who had questioned the faith of a Catholic judicial nominee and got awfully close to imposing a constitutionally impermissible religious test of their own. That speech received far less attention than his criticism of Roy Moore.

In our interview, Flake mentions some of Trump’s worst behavior—promoting the “ugly conspiracy theory” that Obama was not born in the United States, his comments that a “judge couldn’t judge fairly because of his heritage,” and then “obviously the Access Hollywood tape.”

“I’m not sure on which of those issues I shouldn’t have said something,” Flake says. As he writes in his book: “We cannot claim to place the highest premium on character, then abruptly suspend the importance of character in the most vital civic decision that we make. When we excuse on our side what we attack on the other, then we are hypocrites. If we do that as a practice, then we are corrupt.”

The Senate in the balance

The Arizona Republican primary will add another data point to the debate over the hottest political questions of our day: How much room is there in the GOP to criticize Donald Trump and to what extent is the party transforming itself into a cult of personality? But it probably won’t provide definitive answers, simply because the Arizona Republican party in recent decades has been somewhat schizophrenic—the party of sober-minded senators Jon Kyl, John McCain, and Jeff Flake and governor Doug Ducey but also of more extreme figures like former sheriff Joe Arpaio, former governor Jan Brewer, and now possibly Kelli Ward.

Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report says that despite being an underdog, Flake can still win. The two things that could help him the most would be to define his opponent early and for more candidates to jump into the race and split the vote. “If I’m Flake, the more the merrier,” says Duffy. Several names have been thrown around as possible new entrants into the race, including state treasurer Jeff DeWit and former Arizona GOP chairman Robert Graham. Trump has tweeted positive things about Ward, but privately encouraged both DeWit and Graham in August to consider running. Graham tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that he’ll likely decide by Thanksgiving whether to jump in.

Graham expresses concern that both Ward and Flake could lose the general election. He paints Ward as a fringe candidate. In 2014, as a state senator, she held a town-hall event “to address community concerns about chemtrails.” The “chemtrail” conspiracy theory is the belief that those white streaks left in the sky by passing jets aren’t simply engine exhaust but chemicals being dispersed by the government for various nefarious purposes. “When you hear these conspiracy theories, that isolates what I would call reasonable voters. Fringe conspiracy stuff—that’s a really big, big, big thing,” says Graham. Ward now says she doesn’t believe in the chemtrail nonsense but didn’t have an opinion at the time she provided a venue to indulge it. “She tried to talk her way out of it, but there’s public record,” says Graham. Ward’s campaign declined to make her available for an interview for this article.

Graham says his problem with Flake is that his criticism of Trump is too strident, too judgmental, and takes up too much of his attention. “When he was in Congress, people were comfortable supporting him because he defined himself. He was the earmark hawk,” Graham says. “Who is Jeff Flake as a senator? He’s lost all definition.”

The former state party chairman says he’s most worried about losing the seat. The 2018 map favors Republicans—only eight GOP-held Senate seats are up—but Democrats do have a chance to take back the Senate and thereby gain the power to obstruct constitutionalist judicial nominees, the one thing that Republicans of all stripes seem to like about the Trump presidency. The Democrats’ path to gaining the three seats they need involves keeping all of their own seats (even in deep-red states like North Dakota and Montana), winning seats held by GOP senators in the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, and then scoring an upset in a strongly Republican state like Tennessee, Nebraska, or Texas. It’s a tall order but not impossible.

Flake’s standing in the polls and his devil-may-care attitude toward criticizing Trump have prompted some speculation that he may not even stay in the race until the end. I asked Flake if there was any truth to rumors that some Republicans in Washington have encouraged him to step aside so a Republican who’d have an easier time of winning the primary and the general could run. “That sounds like somebody from the other camp spreading rumors to me,” Flake replied, which sounded like a denial, but didn’t precisely sound like the word no.

So is he 100 percent committed to staying in the race? “I had a week where my break coincided with my kid’s day off. Instead I’m bouncing back and forth from California to have a fundraiser with Marco Rubio. I’ve got one with Condoleezza Rice next week. I’ve got four or five in between. That doesn’t sound like a candidate ready to hang it up,” Flake says.

Over the summer, Flake faced far more difficult circumstances than any campaign could present. Within the span of two weeks, his father died and Flake survived an assassination attempt. Flake was at the June 14 congressional GOP baseball practice where a progressive activist opened fire on Republicans, critically wounding congressman Steve Scalise and several others. “When you’re pinned down in a dugout with bullets flying over your head, it does give you a little more sense of mortality. But even more it says you better be doing something that’s worth it. It better be worth it,” Flake says.

At the end of our interview, I asked Flake if there’s a point at which the Republican party will no longer be worth it. How many Kelli Wards and Roy Moores can it nominate before it’s time to start thinking about a new party? “I don’t know,” Flake says. “We’re not there yet.”

John McCormack is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.