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The Arizona Republican is betting his Senate seat on the political appeal of decency—but can that pay off in Trump’s America?

For Flake, one of the most jarring illustrations of Washington’s growing decency deficit came the night of the 2012 State of the Union address. He was seated next to Gabby Giffords, a friend and fellow member of Arizona’s congressional delegation. Giffords, a Democrat, had been shot in the head a year before and was still struggling to recover. Throughout the evening, Flake gently helped her up when she wanted to join the Democrats in a standing ovation—a gesture that meant he was often the only Republican on his feet during Obama’s applause lines. “I started getting texts and emails from people saying, ‘Why are you standing? Why are you standing?’ ”


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Plenty of Republicans criticized Flake for his refusal to fall in line behind Trump. But perhaps his gravest sin against the gods of partisanship was a tweet he sent after Clinton tapped Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate: “Trying to count the ways I hate @timkaine. Drawing a blank. Congrats to a good man and a good friend.” Many Capitol Hill Republicans were apoplectic, Flake told me, recounting a surreal meeting in which one stood up and said, “If you can’t say anything mean, then don’t say anything at all!” The admonition, made with no discernible self-awareness, struck Flake as “a stark admission that we have really gone off the rails.”

As we spoke, Flake repeatedly stressed that he was not fretting over the coarsened political culture simply because he finds it distasteful, nor was he advocating bipartisanship for its own sake. A libertarian-minded Republican with a pristinely conservative voting record, he insists that he has not gone “squishy,” and that he harbors no desire to “sing ‘Kumbaya.’ ” But the decline of civility in politics, he said, has made it nearly impossible for government to function properly.

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Apparently undeterred, Flake spent much of this year finishing a book in which he sharply contrasts Trump’s brand of conservatism with his own vision. Flake told me he wrote the book largely in secret because he knew his campaign consultants would try to talk him out of publishing it during his primary race. “You can always find an excuse to not stand up for your principles,” he said. “But if you don’t risk anything, it doesn’t matter as much.”

All of which raises a larger question about where Flake fits at this fraught moment. He clearly sees himself as engaged in a fight for the soul of his party—beating back the barbarian populists at the gate, standing up for decency and old-fashioned conservative values. But the political battlefield has never looked more uninviting to a warrior of Flake’s kind.

On the morning of June 14, a 66-year-old man armed with a rifle opened fire on a park in Alexandria, Virginia, where Flake was practicing with his fellow GOP legislators for the upcoming Congressional Baseball Game. For several harrowing minutes, police tried to subdue the shooter, and lawmakers scrambled for cover. By the time it was over, five people had been shot. Flake rushed to the side of the Louisiana congressman Steve Scalise, who lay soaked in blood, and helped apply pressure to his wound as they waited for medics to arrive. He then called Scalise’s wife, so that she wouldn’t find out about the shooting on TV.

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He seemed to view the episode as a grim validation of his worst fears about the country. “The deterioration of political discourse in general aids this,” he said. “When we ascribe motives to our opponents, that they are evil, then we’ve almost given license to extreme behavior.”

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About a mile from where we sat, thousands of people were streaming into Nationals Park to take in the Congressional Baseball Game that evening. Ticket sales had spiked in the day since the shooting, and people on TV were asking whether this moment of patriotic unity might serve as a healing balm for a nation sick with rage. Flake wanted to believe that, but he remembered better than most the last time an attack on a lawmaker was supposed to usher in a new era of civility.

“This tends not to last,” he said. Still, he insisted he wasn’t giving up hope. “I don’t know how much further you can go this way before people recoil and say, ‘Let’s change it.’ ”

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A Trump Tower of Absolute Folly

Quote:

Donald Trump’s campaign against his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in which he is seemingly attempting to insult and humiliate and tweet-shame Sessions into resignation, is an insanely stupid exercise. It is a multitiered tower of political idiocy, a sublime monument to the moronic, a gaudy, gleaming, Ozymandian folly that leaves many of the president’s prior efforts in its shade.

A Trump Tower of Absolute Folly

Quote:

Donald Trump’s campaign against his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in which he is seemingly attempting to insult and humiliate and tweet-shame Sessions into resignation, is an insanely stupid exercise. It is a multitiered tower of political idiocy, a sublime monument to the moronic, a gaudy, gleaming, Ozymandian folly that leaves many of the president’s prior efforts in its shade.

NYT

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