Retiring Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) is no fan of Trump. He has drawn a connection between Trump's constant attacks on the press for their criticism of him and Stalin's opposition to a free press.
Let's get the facts straight here. Donald Trump does not believe in the concept of a free press. He wants to prevent the press from criticizing him. If he could imprison and execute anyone who criticizes him, he would. I don't think anyone can seriously challenge that, given what we have observed from Trump. He idolizes Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Saddam Hussein... And he does so precisely because of their authoritarianism. This is on record, and not a debatable point.
What he has done, though, is talk endless shit. His lawyer has filed a suit about Fire and Fury, but that ain't goin' nowhere. We can ask about the blocking of AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner, but at the end of the day, what Trump has done is talk shit. And holes. Shitholes! Tom Cotton and David Perdue are fuckin' liars, is what I guess I'm trying to say here. At least Lindsey Graham isn't going along with the lie.
Anyway, there is a great deal of damage that can be done by trash-talking because there are a lot of people stupid enough to believe Trump. Information is necessary. The more Trump undercuts people's willingness to accept information, the more democracy is undercut. Let's throw in that Woodrow Wilson quote here. Yeah, Wilson was as racist, or maybe even more racist than Trump, but the quote is relevant.
America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern, and nobody can do that.
Um... beg to differ, there, Woody. Donny-boy is doing a pretty good job making the men and women of America forget how to govern. If people decide that there are no sources of information, then they have no information with which to make decisions. And we're all fucked. Yes, you can make the men and women of America forget how to govern. To borrow a phrase from Upton Sinclair, it can happen here.
It hasn't, but it can. Without information.
But Trump hasn't done to the press what Stalin did. This is not the the crushing of democracy. This is the slow erosion of democracy.
Yay?
Jeff Flake is an anomaly within the GOP, though, for saying anything at all negative about Trump. The obvious point is the right one. He is retiring.
There is scholarly research on the role of sincerity in legislative behavior. How much of what legislators do is because they are being pressured by electoral or other considerations, and how much is because it is what they really think is right? Look at retiring legislators. Once legislators decide to retire, they can do whatever the fuck they want. So, they will reveal their sincere preferences. This line of research began with John R. Lott, and has been picked up by several co-authers with Lott, as well as Lawrence Rothenberg & Mitchell Sanders, and a bunch of others, but point being, there's a... lot. Get it? Anyway, elections actually kind of suck. They make legislators... insincere.
The retiring legislators are the ones who have been going after Trump. Mostly. Sort-of. Flake talks a lot of shit about Trump. Corker, in the past, talked a lot of shit about Trump, but in case you haven't noticed, he backed off of that right around the passage of the tax bill, when he caved on his bullshit anti-deficit rhetoric (which, hey, I called it and should never have questioned my original judgment). In fact, Flake made noises about not liking deficits too, and he also caved. What did Flake get? A "seat at the table" for DACA negotiations. You know-- the ones that just got flushed down Trump's shithole! Translation:
Corker and Flake caved because they are cowardly, weak and foolish. And they occasionally lash out in ways that are empty, feckless and laughable.
Do they like Trump? No. Very few congressional Republicans actually like him. But even in retirement, they are mostly cowed by him.
The analogy that I have regularly made about Trump and the GOP is that Trump has an electoral bomb strapped to him with a dead-man trigger, and the entire Republican Party is chained to him. If he goes down, he takes the entire party with him, so the party feels compelled to support him no matter what. If they don't, the party relives the sequence of the 1974 and 1976 elections, in which the party suffered a series of backlashes after the Watergate scandal, resulting in a massive Democratic landslide (a real one...) in Congress, and the election of "history's greatest monster."
The interesting question is how much this matters to retiring legislators like Flake and Corker? Are they concerned about the party after they go? Maybe! Or, maybe there's something else. The other analogy I have made to the relationship between Trump and his party is "learned helplessness." Donald Trump is an abuser. This isn't an analogy. He brags about sexual assault. He does so many horrible things that we, as a political culture, tend to move on to the next outrage, and we are currently focused on shitholegate, but really, we shouldn't have moved on from the fact that he brags about getting away with rape. He is an abuser. He enjoys bullying people, and when people have been bullied for too long within a relationship, the psychological effect is often to decide that there is nothing they can do about it. So, they give up.
A lot of congressional Republicans have simply given up and decided that they must accept fealty to Donald Trump. They simply don't think they can fight him, so they submit to him, the way that abuse victims submit to abusers. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell... they are truly afraid of Donald Trump. And they should be! Within the Republican Party, if Trump decided to go to war with any one of them, he would destroy them.
This brings back the concept of the collective action problem, which I have addressed multiple times in this context, but the point is that Trump has brought the GOP to heel. Note that even Lindsey Graham is being round-about in backing Dick Durbin. He isn't just flat-out saying, "Durbin is right, Trump said it, and now Trump, Cotton and Perdue are lying."
If he were retiring, he might. Then again, maybe not. Even in retirement, Corker and Flake were malleable.