While several Republican lawmakers plan to challenge the electoral votes during Congress’ joint session, former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) is calling on them to stand up to “to the rank corruptions of a demagogue.”
Flake, who retired from the Senate in 2019, penned an op-ed in The New York Times published on Wednesday, where he wrote, “There is power in standing up to the rank corruptions of a demagogue.”
“Mr. Trump can’t hurt you. But he is destroying us,” Flake wrote, taking aim at President Donald Trump.
Flake wrote that as Trump “crosses that rubicon” with being in an “alternate reality in which he won,” the president “has taken many in my party with him, all of whom seem to have learned the wrong lessons from this anomalous presidency.”
He added, “If the only acceptable outcome is for your side to win, and a loser simply refuses to lose, then America is imperiled.”
Flake also touched on his time in Congress, and the end to it:
“I once had a career in public life — six terms in the House of Representatives and another six years in the Senate — and then the rise of a dangerous demagogue, and my party’s embrace of him, ended that career. Or rather, I chose not to go along with my party’s rejection of its core conservative principles in favor of that demagogue.”
Additionally, the former senator took aim at congressional Republicans who have sided with Trump over everything:
“It is hard to comprehend how so many of my fellow Republicans were able — and are still able — to engage in the fantasy that they had not abruptly abandoned the principles they claimed to believe in. It is also difficult to understand how this betrayal could be driven by deference to the unprincipled, incoherent and blatantly self-interested politics of Donald Trump, defined as it is by its chaos and boundless dishonesty. The conclusion that I have come to is that they did it for the basest of reasons — sheer survival and rank opportunism.”
Flake touched on the joint session of Congress that will occur on Wednesday to formally ratify the Electoral College vote — which will cement Biden’s win.
He said that instead of Americans witnessing the “majesty of a peaceful transfer of power,” they find themselves in a “bizarre condition” faced “with madness unspooling from the White House, grievous damage to our body politic compounding daily.”
Trump has refused to concede the election, despite the Electoral College vote affirming his win. The president has continued to push unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud.
Flake endorsed Biden for president. He previously appeared in an advertisement for Biden where he noted he has been “a conservative Republican my entire life” and “never before voted for a Democrat for president” but “this year, principle and conscience require me to do just that,” noting his support for Biden.
