‘We Did This for This Man?’
The Atlantic · McKay Coppins ·
The vindication of Never Trump conservatives
It was the morning after the midterm elections, and Jeff Flake couldn’t stop laughing. Not necessarily a mean laugh—Flake, who is preternaturally good-humored, tends to chuckle amiably through most conversations. But I thought I detected a quantum of vindication or glee in the voice of the former senator from Arizona.
I’d called Flake to ask what he made of his party’s historic electoral meltdown. “It feels literally like a 10-year fever just broke,” he told me. “I’ve been saying to my wife, It’ll break. It’ll break, and she’s been saying, When? When? When? And it looks like it has.”
During the first Trump administration, Flake distinguished himself as one of Capitol Hill’s most outspoken Republican critics of the president—of his character, his policies, and his coarsening of America’s political culture. Flake was heartbroken by his party’s craven accommodation of Donald Trump and routinely called it out. “One day in the not too distant future,” he’d predicted in 2019, “Republicans will wake up and say, ‘We did this for this man?’”
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