“Far from conservative,” Flake writes, “the president’s comportment was rather a study in the importance of conflict in reality television — that once you introduce conflict, you cannot de-escalate conflict. As a Republican member of Congress, he is declaring Trump a domestic and international menace. Like Goldwater — who was also a Republican senator from Arizona — Flake bemoans the crisis facing conservatives, and like Goldwater, he believes that conservatives have only themselves to blame. But if you take Flake at his word, it’s not just Republican principle that’s at stake right now. “Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos,” Flake writes.

Source: New York Times July 31, 2017 21:01 UTC