Trump Lashes Out at Ex-Senator Jeff Flake Over Criticism of His Attempts to Overturn Election Results

Late last night, ex-Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican who represented the state of Arizona until he announced he would not seek reelection in 2018, criticized President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the November 3 general election.

“There is long-term damage when this kind of behavior is normalized. It is not normal, and elected Republicans need to speak out against it,” Flake wrote.

Flake. now a contributor for CBS News, has been a vocal critic of President Trump for several years. It was only a matter of time before the president responded. He finally did earlier this morning.

“…And it’s not normal when a sitting Senator is forced to retire because his Arizona poll numbers were so low that he would have come out dead last in the Republican Primary, and had zero chance of winning the general election,” Trump wrote.

Flake had one of the lowest approval ratings of any senator during his career in Washington, experiencing his highest approval ratings ahead of his retirement. Nevertheless, he was a regular target for the president for remarking, to cite one example, that the president has a “seemingly bottomless appetite for destruction and division” and has “only a passing familiarity with how the Constitution works.”

“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 at the time.

Flake is just one of many to criticize the president in recent weeks in light of claims he’s made that the election was fraudulent. There is no evidence of widespread election fraud; the claim has been disputed by United States security agencies.

Alan Ryland

Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.