From almost the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in June 2015, the term “Republican establishment” has been ubiquitous. Sometimes it means Republican moderates, sometimes it means GOP officeholders generally, and sometimes it just means any Republican not named Donald Trump. Curiously, no one has ever claimed to be a member of this apparently formidable society. We begin to think that the Republican establishment, as Sartre wrote of hell, is “other people.”
But surely the term means something. We would suggest that it refers most helpfully to Republican officeholders who show more interest in political survival than in political principle, who sound like conservatives until it matters, and who do or say whatever happens to further their ambitions at any given moment.
Take Tennessee senator Bob Corker. In March 2016, he issued a statement in response to Mitt Romney’s speech critical of Donald Trump. “Here’s my message to the Republican Party leaders,” Corker stated, clearly meaning those not on board with Trump: “Focus more on listening to the American people and less on trying to stifle their voice. What’s happening in the Republican primary is the result of two things: the fecklessness and ineptness of the Washington establishment in failing to address the big issues facing our country and years of anger with the overreach of the Obama administration. And to be candid, I think the American people should be angrier than they are.”
Trump relished the Corker statement and, as our Michael Warren noted on Monday, linked to it from his Twitter account.
In April 2016, with Trump nearing the delegate total necessary to become the GOP nominee, Corker applauded Trump’s first major campaign speech on foreign policy—praising the candidate for, yes, “challenging the foreign policy establishment.” Corker was “repulsed,” he said, by those who were considering challenging Trump at the convention in July. Not long after, he suggested that Trump’s Republican critics should “chill”—“My sense is when people are out there saying ‘Never this’ or ‘Never that,’ a better place to be is to chill and let the campaign evolve a little bit and see where the candidate ends up.”
His colors began to change, ever so slightly, in May of this year, when egregious White House leaks were the stuff of nearly every day’s headlines. Then Corker made the rather obvious point that the White House was in a “downward spiral” and needed to “bring itself under control.” As late as July, Corker was still praising the president for his ability to “listen.” Mostly, one assumes, to the junior senator from Tennessee: “I can’t remember calling over to talk to the president and not being immediately put through and having a conversation with him,” Corker remarked proudly. “I can call him at 10 o’clock at night, and he’ll get on the phone. Or I can call him early in the morning, and he’ll get on the phone.”
Corker joined the legions of elected officials offering criticism of Trump in the wake of Charlottesville in comments to Chattanooga Rotarians on August 17: Trump, Corker said, “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the competence, that he needs to demonstrate in order for him to be successful.”
But by mid-September, as Corker contemplated his own political future, he managed to set aside these concerns about stability and competence in order to pronounce himself once again a steadfast ally of the president. “Our relationship is very, very strong . . . For people to act as if there’s daylight between us, that just is not true.”
Corker announced his retirement less than two weeks later. And a week after that, speaking to a gaggle of reporters, he offered a stunning rebuke of Trump. “I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis, and Chief of Staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos.”
When Trump claimed on Twitter that Corker announced his retirement after Trump refused to endorse him, Corker responded: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”
Days later, Corker expanded on his warnings in an interview with the New York Times. He’s worried, he told the Times, that the president has put us “on the path to World War III.” “He concerns me,” says Corker. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.” And on Monday he was portrayed in a news analysis piece in the Times as the one Republican willing to say what others think but won’t say.
What courage. What conviction.
The journey from enabler to opponent—from “chill” to “concerned” —wasn’t overnight, but it was pretty fast. Just one month after Corker eagerly proclaimed that “no daylight” exists between his views and Trump’s he declares that those same views will lead to a catastrophic global war. Whether it has anything to do with the president’s refusal to nominate the senator to a coveted cabinet position—as Trump claims, in characteristically theatrical fashion—we can’t say.
What we know is that Corker has never had much time for any sort of principled or ideological disruption in his decade in the Senate. When a conservative took an important stand, Corker was usually somewhere else. His support for social conservatism was lackluster, his interest in budgetary restraint intermittent. His principal achievement as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was to give President Obama the specious legal authority he needed to cut a nuclear deal with a state sponsor of terrorism.
We’ve grown weary of the endless what-led-to-Trump theorizing. But indulge us one last time: Bob Corker and unprincipled elected officials like him led to Donald Trump, figuratively and, in this case, literally.
Corker still has more than a year in office. We assume his newfound conviction will be on full display from now till then. After that, we hope the ex-senator will head home to Tennessee and chill.
