Another Republican Senator has stepped forward to condemn Donald Trump, labelling the US President “dangerous to democracy” in a blistering take-down.
In a withering attack from the floor of the Senate, Jeff Flake, who represents Arizona, said it was “time for our complicity and accommodation to the unacceptable to end” and said Republicans would not “meekly accept such behaviour” if a Democrat was in the White House.
His tirade came hours after he joined fellow Republican Bob Corker in announcing he would not stand for office next year. Corker, too, unleashed a stinging rebuke earlier in the day - accusing Trump of “debasing” the US.
Flake, who has criticised the path that the Republican Party has taken under Trump, told The Arizona Republic in advance of his announcement that “there may not be a place for a Republican like me” in the current GOP.
Railing against the “appalling features of our current politics”, he told the Senate that lawmakers should “never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals”.
Watch the full speech from the Senate floor below.
“It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end,” he went on.
Flake published a book this year called Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle, in which he takes on Trump and the GOP, arguing that “conservatism is indeed in crisis”.
Flake was critical of Trump during the 2016 election, although he didn’t outright condemn or campaign against the business mogul. He said in August 2016 that he had “little faith” Trump would change his ways and dismissed Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border as “a joke.”
Corker, the US Senator who branded the White House an “adult daycare centre”, added today that the President has “great difficulty with the truth” and is “purposely breaking down relationships we have around the world that had been useful to our nation”.
“It’s amazing. Unfortunately world leaders are very aware that much of what he says is untrue,” Corker continued. “Certainly people here are because these things are provably untrue. They’re just factually incorrect and people know the difference.”