Sen. Bob Corker, the outspoken Republican from Tennessee who last week lashed out at Donald Trump for his actions, on Tuesday praised Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for what was widely seen as a critical speech of the president, according to a report in CNN.
"Well the pieces that I saw, I loved, and I gave him a big hug on the floor," Corker told reporters. "It's a great speech."
McCain questioned "half-baked, spurious nationalism" in America's foreign policy on Monday night in Philadelphia after he received the Liberty Medal Award for a lifetime of service and sacrifice to the country.
"To abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems," he said, "is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history."
He continued: "We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil."
Asked Tuesday in Washington if McCain was referring to Trump, the longtime senator said, "No, I was referring to the whole atmosphere and environment."
Trump told a radio station Tuesday that "people have to be careful because at some point I fight back."
"I'm being very nice," Trump added. "I'm being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back and it won't be pretty."
Corker, the powerful chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, last week offered the sharpest criticism of Trump of any Republican senator to date, calling the White House an "adult day care center" and saying the president was setting the nation on course to "World War III."