Corker's Convictions

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.”