Republicans Like Bob Corker Have Nowhere to Go

Senator Bob Corker had just gotten out of a hot-yoga session with his wife on a Sunday morning in 2017 when his phone started blowing up. President Donald Trump was tweeting about him, falsely claiming that the Tennessee Republican supported the Iran deal (he did not) and that he had begged Trump for a reelection endorsement (Corker says he never did such a thing). “I got to my house, and I was dripping wet, standing in my closet, getting undressed to go jump in the shower,” Corker told me recently from his office in Chattanooga. He typed out a response: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.” Corker sent it to a couple members of his staff—“No public officials should ever send their own tweets,” he says—whom he expected to talk him down. “No, it’s too good,” they told him. “We’re going to let it go.” The comment has now been retweeted nearly 148,000 times.

Corker’s tweet seemed to resonate because it stated plainly something that few Republicans were willing to say out loud at the time: The country was being run by someone who regularly broadcasted false information, seemingly without forethought or input from his staff. But Corker, who left office in 2019, gets frustrated by the focus on this kind of dramatic episode. “I spend not one second of my day thinking