With Flake Leaving, Trump 'Feels Like America Is Winning'

The upcoming retirements of Bob Corker and now Jeff Flake from the United States Senate will be helpful to President Donald Trump if his supporters get what they hope for: Republican successors in those seats who will be better soldiers for Trump. That’s very likely in Tennessee, where the Trump-friendly congresswoman Marsha Blackburn is an early favorite to win the GOP nomination to succeed Corker and would have a clear advantage in the Republican-heavy state.

Things are more complicated in Arizona, where the only remaining declared candidate is the super-Trumpy Kelli Ward, who has the backing of the likes of Steve Bannon but is viewed as a problematic general-election candidate against the leading Democrat, congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema. (Flake, for that matter, would have been in deep trouble in his reelection bid had he made it through a tough primary.) The GOP establishment views Flake’s exit as a chance to find a better general-election candidate who could also win in a primary—meaning someone more amenable to the president but also more electable than Ward. One Washington Republican told me Martha McSally, a congresswoman and retired Air Force colonel, might fit the bill.

But even assuming things go well for Republicans in these races, that doesn’t solve a more immediate problem for Donald Trump: Corker and Flake, who on Tuesday issued separate broadsides against the president, will remain in the Senate for the next 14 months. That’s a lot of time, with a lot of legislative items on the agenda. As a practical matter, both senators’ reliability for party-line votes—on tax reform, on health care, on anything else the Republicans will want to accomplish before the 2018 midterms—is in real question.

Mitch McConnell has a narrow margin in the Senate to begin with. These Trump-inspired departures don’t make it any easier for McConnell to get the president’s agenda through.

What should Americans make of the back-and-forth between Trump and his Republican Senate foes? The message Tuesday from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: This is what the voters signed up for.