Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) said under the leadership of President Donald Trump the Republican Party had “lost its way” and argued the party needed “to go back to traditional conservatism.”
Flake said, “I think similarly today the party’s lost its way. We’ve given in to nativism and protectionism, and I think that if we’re going to be a governing party in the future a majority party, we’ve got to go back to traditional conservatism, limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, respect for free trade. Those are the principles that made us who we are.”
He continued, “If you look at the politics of today, the tape from last week at the White House and the language that was used, we’ve seen unfortunately too many examples of members of Congress and other elected officials using language referring to your opponents in ways that you would have never done before, ascribing the worst motives to your opponents and assuming that other Americans are the enemy, and that is just not the way it used to be. I don’t think it can be that way in the future.”
He added, “Now we’ve, I think, taken up a banner that is not familiar to us. Its one of intense nationalism, nativism and sometimes xenophobia.”
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