He wouldn’t be retiring if he was a conservative.
Via RCP:
Republican Jeff Flake delivered a speech Thursday at the annual ‘Politics and Eggs’ event at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. Flake said that during the administration of President Donald Trump, conservatives were an endangered species and the Republican Party had surrendered to a “propaganda-fueled dystopian view.”
Flake, who recently called for a 2020 Republican primary challenger against President Trump, is in the group of people who might do just that. “I haven’t ruled it out,” he told CNN later in this same day.
“I stand before you today the rarest of species,” the retiring moderate Republican said at the start of his speech. “The American Conservative.”
“Americanus Never-Trumpus, subgenus RINO,” he joked. “There is a scurrilous rumor afoot that we’re not only rare but endangered. I don’t believe it!”
“But seriously, when the putatively conservative party loses its grasp on the meaning of basic terms –basically, the word conservative– that could just be a sign we’ve taken a wrong turn,” he said. “Say, hypothetically in 2018 we have a libertine budget-busting president who exudes chaos and dotes on authoritarians, who has replaced the State Dept. with Twitter, lives in a golden palace when he’s not at the White House, and he’s the conservative… And I’m the RINO.”
“The amazing thing is that in Washington right now, among people in my party, when you hear those two comparative profiles, people will say… yeah what’s the problem? It is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. What have we done with all the conservatives?”
“In seriousness though, we have a long road to recover as a party.”