Sen. Jeff Fake, R-Ariz., ripped President Donald Trump in a commencement speech Wednesday at Harvard School of Law, in which he accused Trump of having "debased" the office of the president.
"Not to be unpleasant, but I do bring news from our nation's capital. First, the good news: Your national leadership is ... not good," Flake said in his speech, according to CNN.
"At all. Our presidency has been debased. By a figure who has a seemingly bottomless appetite for destruction and division. And only a passing familiarity with how the Constitution works."
He added later: "Now, you might reasonably ask, where is the good news in that? Well, simply put: We may have hit bottom. Oh, and that's also the bad news. In a rare convergence, the good news and bad news are the same: Our leadership is not good, but it probably can't get much worse."
In an interview with The Washington Post after the speech, Flake identified Trump's habit of using insulting nicknames as an example of how he's hurting the office.
"When you refer to your opponents in the legislature, for example, in the Congress, and call them losers and clowns and nicknames for people — that's debasing the presidency. That's not presidential," he said.
When asked about whether his imminent retirement is setting the stage to run against Trump in 2020, Flake was noncommittal.
"There's a lot of time between now and 2020," he said. "It's not in my plans, but I'm not ruling anything out."
Flake added: "I do hope that somebody challenges the president in the primary — if only to remind Republicans what Republicans stand for," and that he is "concerned that [Republicans] are sounding too much like the president's Cabinet. And we're not."
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