On July 5th, 2016, Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee, who on Sunday
tweeted that the White House had become an “adult day care center” and told the
Times that he worried that President Trump might set off “World War
III,”
walked onstage with Trump at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. Corker told the
crowd that he hadn’t planned to speak but was moved to do so both by the
audience’s enthusiasm and by what he had come to appreciate about Trump,
as a person, after spending the day with him. “So many times in these
campaigns, people become caricatures of what the media makes them,”
Corker said. But he had seen how Trump treated the people around him,
and met his family, and witnessed the respect they shared. “And I
figured out, the reason you love him so much”—here, the crowd
interrupted him with cheers—“is because he loves you! He loves you and he wants the best for
you!”

Maybe it mattered that, at the time of the rally, Corker was said
to be under consideration as Trump’s running mate. Even when Corker
withdrew his name, the next day, he expressed his willingness to serve
in some other capacity—he’d also been spoken of as a potential Secretary
of State—and reiterated his respect for Trump. “His best running mate,
by the way, would be Ivanka,” he told CNN. “I know that would not pass
muster, but she’s most impressive. As is Eric. As is Jared.” (Corker
also said that it had been a “privilege” to spend time with Paul
Manafort, who was then Trump’s campaign head.) Corker had not been
living in a bubble; two weeks before, on “This Week with George
Stephanopoulos,” he had said that he did not “condone” Trump’s claim
that Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was hearing a case involving a Trump
company, would be biased against him because of the judge’s Hispanic
heritage. But Corker went on to express his support for Trump’s
candidacy, in part because he saw in Trump an opportunity to inject, of
all things, maturity into the foreign-policy realm. Corker used the
word several times, as when he said of seeing, in Trump’s statements, “a
degree of realism coming back into our foreign policy. . . . And I think
bringing that maturity back into our foreign policy is something that’s
important.” Otherwise, the two parties would continue “down a path that
is really degrading America’s greatness.” And, anyway, Corker told
Stephanopoulos, Trump had been talking to Henry Kissinger, who had, in
turn, given Corker the sense that the candidate was asking all the right
questions. With Kissinger and Ivanka on the case, what could go wrong?

Since that time, Corker has gained a reputation for being
relatively critical of Trump, although not without equivocations. For
example, in August, after Trump seemed to equate white supremacists in
Charlottesville with those who opposed them, Corker said, “The President
has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the
competence that he needs to demonstrate, in order for him to be
successful.” But, on “Meet the Press” on October 1st, when Chuck Todd
asked Corker about those comments, Corker blamed the press for
misinterpreting him: “What I said is he has not yet demonstrated” those qualities—that is, not that
Trump didn’t have them. Corker said that he had, in a visit with Trump,
had a “humorous” media-blaming exchange on the subject. And, besides, he
told Todd, there had been “transformative” positive changes in the White
House since August, brought about by the new chief of staff, John Kelly.
That time period, as it happens, included Trump’s “Rocket Man” tweets
goading North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Perhaps Corker would still be vacillating about Trump if he hadn’t
decided to retire when his term ends, or if Trump hadn’t woken up on
Sunday morning and decided to belittle him. In a tirade spanning
multiple tweets, Trump said that Corker had “begged” him to endorse him:
“I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my
endorsement).” What prompted this was hard to say—diffuse frustration;
comments that Corker had made about how Trump’s budget would increase
the deficit; frustrations over the Iran nuclear deal, for which Trump
blamed actions that Corker had taken as the chair of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee; or just the weather. Corker’s theory, which he
tweeted out, was that “someone obviously missed their shift this
morning”—someone, that is, who was supposed to monitor Trump’s behavior,
and help the Republican Party maintain the pretense that he was a fit
President. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House,
it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” he said. The Times said
that Corker made it clear that the principal containers were Kelly,
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (who reportedly called Trump a
“fucking
moron”),
and Secretary of Defense James Mattis. What is striking is that Corker regarded this situation as sustainable.
“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,”
Corker told the Times. But having a volatile figurehead is not fine,
if one is aiming for a healthy democracy rather than just settling for
an absence of nuclear war.

On a lesser level, Corker also said that Trump’s description of their
exchange was a lie, in that Trump really had wanted to endorse him. “I
don’t know why the President tweets out things that are not true,” he
told the paper. “You know he does it, everyone knows he does it.” It is
telling that what was finally too much for Corker was not an assault on
the nation’s safety but on his own pride. Similarly, Corker said, “Look,
except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands
what we’re dealing with here.” If that is the case, those senators ought
to be asked, directly, whether this is true. The real test would be
whether they are willing to say so even if they have something, like an
election or campaign contributions, to lose.

One might be tempted to call this the Corker test, if Corker himself were
not, in some ways, still failing it. He told the Times, as the paper
put it, that “he did not regret standing with” Trump “during the
campaign last year.” He also stressed how much he personally liked
Trump, with whom, the Times noted, he played golf. The Corker episode
is perhaps a case study of a delusion still affecting too many senior
Republicans: that they can use him without being used by him. It is hard
to feel too much sympathy for them if Trump does not hold up his end of
whatever bargain they believed they had, given the collateral costs—the
damage to vulnerable groups, the enshrining of bigotry, and, indeed, the
heightened risk of a third World War—that were always built in. But the
most useful lesson might be that Republicans actually did, and do, have
choices. The rally in North Carolina at which Corker joined Trump
onstage, and encouraged voters to trust him over the media, was two
weeks before the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland. It may,
in a practical sense, have been too late for anyone to have stopped
Trump from getting the nomination, but there was surely time for members
of the Party to offer a sense of its soul that was not filled with
Trump. Instead, the mood on the Convention floor was in many ways more
unified than at the Democratic Convention, in Philadelphia.

What matters now even more than what the Republicans could have done in
2016 is what they are willing to do in 2020. Will there be serious
primary challengers to Trump? If so, will they come from places other
than the Party’s fringe, and will those in what is left of the
Republican establishment be able to speak honestly about what might
happen in a second Trump term? Will they realize, most of all, that they
are not just spectators or compromised babysitters but are themselves
adults who are responsible for the country’s safety? Last time around,
Corker might have been influenced by Trump’s popularity in his own
state—in November, Trump got more than sixty per cent of the vote in Tennessee.
But his margin in North Carolina, where Corker campaigned for him, was
less than four percentage points. That was a state that Hillary Clinton
had been expected, at one point, to win.