WASHINGTON
— Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President
Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless
threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to
World War III.”
In
an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker
said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The
Apprentice’ or something.”
“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”
Mr.
Corker’s comments capped a remarkable day of sulfurous insults between
the president and the Tennessee senator — a powerful, if lame-duck,
lawmaker, whose support will be critical to the president on tax reform
and the fate of the Iran nuclear deal.
It
began on Sunday morning when Mr. Trump, posting on Twitter, accused Mr.
Corker of deciding not to run for re-election because he “didn’t have
the guts.” Mr. Corker shot back
in his own tweet: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day
care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”
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The
senator, Mr. Trump said, had “begged” for his endorsement. “I said ‘NO’
and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement),” the president wrote. He also said that Mr. Corker had asked to be secretary of state. “I said ‘NO THANKS,’” he wrote.
Mr.
Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to
run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid
bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to
irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the
transition from show business.
Mr.
Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of
senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts.
“I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a
situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone
interview.
The
deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had
been a friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected
official, one of the few genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed
on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled his stinging accusations, Mr.
Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump, until now an
occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Corker’s remarks.
Mr.
Trump’s feud with Mr. Corker is particularly perilous given that the
president has little margin for error as he tries to pass a landmark
overhaul of the tax code — his best, and perhaps last, hope of producing
a major legislative achievement this year.
If
Senate Democrats end up unified in opposition to the promised tax bill,
Mr. Trump could lose the support of only two of the Senate’s 52
Republicans to pass it. That is the same challenging math that Mr. Trump
and Senate Republican leaders faced in their failed effort to repeal
and replace the Affordable Care Act.
Mr.
Corker could also play a key role if Mr. Trump follows through on his
threat to “decertify” the Iran nuclear deal, kicking to Congress the
issue of whether to restore sanctions on Tehran and effectively scuttle
the pact.
Republicans
could hold off on sanctions but use the threat of them to force Iran
back to the negotiating table — a strategy being advocated by Senator
Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican. But that approach could leave the
United States isolated, and it will be up to Mr. Corker to balance
opposition to the deal with the wishes of those, including some of Mr.
Trump’s own aides, who want to change the accord but not blow it up.
Beyond
the Iran deal, Mr. Corker’s committee holds confirmation hearings on
Mr. Trump’s ambassadorial appointments. If the president were to oust Rex W. Tillerson as secretary of state, as some expect, Mr. Corker would lead the hearings on Mr. Trump’s nominee for the post.
In
a 25-minute conversation, Mr. Corker, speaking carefully and
purposefully, seemed to almost find cathartic satisfaction by portraying
Mr. Trump in terms that most senior Republicans use only in private.
The
senator, who is close to Mr. Tillerson, invoked comments that the
president made on Twitter last weekend in which he appeared to undercut
Mr. Tillerson’s negotiations with North Korea.
“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” Mr. Corker said.
Without
offering specifics, he said Mr. Trump had repeatedly undermined
diplomacy with his Twitter fingers. “I know he has hurt, in several
instances, he’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway
by tweeting things out,” Mr. Corker said.
All
but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the
president, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by
nearly every Senate Republican.
“Look,
except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands
what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they
understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous
amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the
middle of the road.”
As for the tweets that set off the feud on Sunday morning, Mr. Corker expressed a measure of powerlessness.
“I
don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true,” he
said. “You know he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.”
The
senator recalled four conversations this year, a mix of in-person
meetings and phone calls, in which he said the president had encouraged
him to run for re-election. Mr. Trump, he said, repeatedly indicated he
wanted to come to Tennessee for an early rally on Mr. Corker’s behalf
and even telephoned him last Monday to try to get him to reconsider his
decision to retire.
“When
I told him that that just wasn’t in the cards, he said, ‘You know, if
you run, I’ll endorse you.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, it’s just not in the
cards; I’ve already made a decision.’ So then we began talking about
other candidates that were running.”
One
of the most prominent establishment-aligned Republicans to develop a
relationship with Mr. Trump, the senator said he did not regret standing
with him during the campaign last year.
“I
would compliment him on things that he did well, and I’d criticize
things that were inappropriate,” he said. “So it’s been really the same
all the way through.”
A
former mayor of Chattanooga who became wealthy in construction, Mr.
Corker, 65, has carved out a reputation over two terms in the Senate as a
reliable, but not overly partisan, Republican.
While
he opposed President Barack Obama’s divisive nuclear deal with Iran, he
did not prevent it from coming to a vote on the Senate floor, which
exposed him to fierce fire from conservatives, who blamed him for its
passage.
Mr. Trump picked up on that theme hours after his initial tweets, writing
that “Bob Corker gave us the Iran Deal, & that’s about it. We need
HealthCare, we need Tax Cuts/Reform, we need people that can get the job
done!”
Mr.
Corker was briefly a candidate to be Mr. Trump’s running mate in 2016,
but he withdrew his name from consideration and later expressed
ambivalence about Mr. Trump’s campaign, in part because he said he found
it frustrating to discuss foreign policy with him.
To
some extent, the rift between the two men had been building for months,
as Mr. Corker repeatedly pointed out on Sunday to argue that his
criticism was not merely that of a man liberated from facing the voters
again.
After
a report last week that Mr. Tillerson had once referred to Mr. Trump as
a “moron,” Mr. Corker told reporters that Mr. Tillerson was one of
three officials helping to “separate our country from chaos.” Those
remarks were repeated on “Fox News Sunday,” which may have prompted Mr.
Trump’s outburst.
In August, after Mr. Trump’s equivocal response to the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va.,
Mr. Corker told reporters that the president “has not yet been able to
demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to
demonstrate in order to be successful.”
He
said on Sunday that he had made all those comments deliberately, aiming
them at “an audience of one, plus those people who are closely working
around with him, what I would call the good guys.” He was referring to
Mr. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the White House chief of
staff, John F. Kelly.
“As
long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him
down when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work
with him before a decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine,” he said.
Mr.
Corker would not directly answer when asked whether he thought Mr.
Trump was fit for the presidency. But he did say that the commander in
chief was not fully aware of the power of his office.
“I
don’t think he appreciates that when the president of the United States
speaks and says the things that he does, the impact that it has around
the world, especially in the region that he’s addressing,” he said. “And
so, yeah, it’s concerning to me.”
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