CNN One Thing

Over the past week, some key primary early voting states have been getting a taste of what the 2028 presidential race might look like.

I think they need new leadership, to be honest.

In South Carolina, possible Democratic presidential hopefuls like Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz attended fundraising and party events, hoping to figure out how to reverse deep frustration within their base.

When people say, let's move to the center, I'm like, no, no. We're not doing that. I believe, and I'm a crazy optimist, but I believe if you get the right person, like Obama, with the right message, we can form a coalition to win.

'Some key Republican senators made the trip to Iowa, hoping to convince residents that President Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill needs changes. The Iowans who spoke to CNN largely did not agree. They want to see it on Trump's desk soon. And that's the thing. How do Republicans push back against the specifics of Trump's agenda without angering his base? And how soon is too soon to start planning for a post-Trump future? Today, one of Trump's loudest critics in Congress from his first term on why those conversations are already happening. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind.

Mr. President, the senator from Arizona...

In 2017 Arizona Senator Jeff Flake saw the writing on the wall

With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. By now, we all know better.

He had been speaking out loudly against Trump ever since he announced his run for the white house and fellow Republicans were not pleased. He was labeled a rhino Republican in name only. So Flake announced he would retire and give up his seat rather than face a Republican primary.

The notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and I believe profoundly misguided.

And while he continued to largely vote for Trump priorities, he still spoke out. And in 2022, he was appointed the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey by President Joe Biden. Well, last Saturday, I had the chance to speak with Flake during a live taping at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival in Seattle, and we're gonna play that for you today. We get into the state of the Republican Party and whether this era of grievance politics will ever end, why he thinks Trump's foreign policy instincts are largely right, but the approach is misguided. And whether he will ever seek office again. So here it is, my conversation with Ambassador Jeff Flake. And I wanna go back to something you said on the Senate floor when you announced that retirement. You were talking about the populism that had taken hold in the party and this general instinct to govern by anger and resentment. And you said, quote, this spell will eventually break. That is my belief. We will return to ourselves once more. And I say, the sooner the better. And again, that was 2017. This is 2025. It's clearly not broken. And so I guess I'm wondering how long did you think it would take to play?

'This has been one heck of a fever, let me tell you. No, I had hoped that it would break. I certainly didn't think that President Trump would be elected for a second term. He was denied a second-term initially, but obviously won it again. And I still believe that anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy, not an effective one. It may be a way to win elections, but it's not a government philosophy, and I think we're seeing some of the limits of that now.

Yeah, I mean, I guess this is kind of, you know, what it is at the current moment. And then going back to that moment when you made that decision, I guess I'm wondering if there was any part of you that thought, maybe I can tweak my language a little bit to appeal to some of this crowd so that I can stay in office and affect some of the change, push back, rather than to just say, you know, I can't do it. Did you ever think about that?

'Ah, every politician thinks about that. And obviously, every politicians, myself included, you, during a campaign, you say, you know, this is what I'm gonna emphasize now because this is the voters want. And I'm not denying that that doesn't occur. But for me, at that time, it would have required for me to change everything I had said. To say those things I said about the president and his behavior and his policies, I no longer feel that way. Or he's grown on me. And I could have done that, certainly. I've seen the polling, we'd done polling in my state, in Arizona, and definitely could have done that. Could have won re-election, but at what cost? I just thought, how can I face my kids? And how can sleep at night if I had just, you know, just changed everything I believed? And so, for me... There was maybe a hope that I could, you know, that the voters would come back around, that maybe deeper into the, you know by the time re-election would come a year and a half later that yeah, the voters will appreciate, you know in Arizona, voters have always appreciated having more of a maverick independence, you know Barry Goldwater, John McCain, I'd won election, but it was clear by that time that the voter's wanted somebody who agreed with the president all the time. I couldn't it couldn't be me

Was there a specific moment early on when Trump was on office that first time where you realized that the voters were locked in in that way?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was not just polling, but I would go there to everybody has town halls. And it was pretty clear that they wanted somebody who believed where the president is and was where the President was on immigration issues. You know, the proposed Muslim ban was never completely implemented, but elements of it were those kind of things I could never get on board with. And going to a town hall or to a district meeting, a precinct committee meeting in my state. I could not defend those policies and with a straight face. So it became clear pretty early. And then the things that he was saying about my partner in the Senate, John McCain, you know, I could never countenance that. My first meeting with Donald Trump was at the Senate NRSC, the campaign arm. We were off campus and met with him. And this was after he had just said that he couldn't respect John McCain. Because he'd been captured. And I told him, I said, that's an awful thing. And you can't say that. You told him that to his face directly? Yeah, I did. I said you can say that about John McCain. And he said, well, yes, I can. I have Joe Arpaio, the popular sheriff in Arizona. I have his support and you're gonna lose your election in November, he told me. I said well, I'm not up in November. Be that as it may. I just, I couldn't take the style of politics, this grievance style of the politics, this coarsening of the rhetoric and calling your opponents across the aisle suckers or losers. It just is not my style of political. And so that was bad enough, but then some of the policies as well, I thought were very troubling.

'You wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed, and you were urging Republicans to speak up, especially on the global stage. But what incentive is there for Republicans to speak out if they look at someone like you, who took this principled stance and is not an officer?

There's not much, that article piece was written this week in the Washington Post, and I did encourage saying that some things, some guardrails still exist on domestic policy mostly. The courts will intervene, you'll have midterm elections come which will lead to a course correction on some issues, but on foreign issues and in foreign policy in particular, and having just served overseas for three years. Some of that is tougher to turn around. And our allies right now and other countries are deciding who they're gonna be with and what they do from here. And so what I was encouraging my former colleagues to do, particularly Republicans, is to stand up and remind our allies that they're still our allies. That you can't respond to everything the president says that is reckless or demeaning. But when he, encourages, not encourages, but the fans of Canada become a 51st state or talks about taking Greenland by force, those things, you stand up and remind our allies and our colleagues overseas that that is not us. And that's not our party. Because if you do, then they'll say, well, hey, we can outlast this. But if they believe that the party is entirely with the president on this. Then it's an easier decision to seek security arrangements otherwise, to enter other trade alliances. And that's dangerous because that lasts a lot longer.

'Well, so one of your former Republican colleagues, Lindsey Graham, is co-sponsoring a bill with Democrat Richard Blumenthal to impose more sanctions on Russia, which is something Trump has been kind of hesitant about doing as they tried to negotiate with Ukraine and the war there. Is that like a version of something you want to see? Is that a version? Of speaking up.

Yes, it is. They were in Ukraine yesterday, I believe, Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham. Yes, and that's important. That's exactly what I'm saying. At least to have some people stand up and say, that is not us. Because I can tell you, as a senator and as an ambassador later in an important allied country, the leaders there pay a what the Congress says and does.

'Is the way that Trump is kind of trying to negotiate the end to these various conflicts around the world, this direct one-on-one style, you know, where he says it's probably going to have to end up with him and Putin in a room somewhere, can that be effective?

It can be, but you have to understand who Putin really is, and I'm not sure that the president has come to grips with.

With who we have a really struck me the the other day when he said that putin had gone crazy you know after about a recent about of rockets as if this hasn't been a i a

Yeah, he said that I've come to the conclusion that he wants to take all of Ukraine. Well, I think he made that crystal clear back in February of 22. So yeah, I I think it can be effective. And let me just say some of the things the president has done overseas lately. I have applauded him going to the Middle East and meeting with the Syrian leader and saying we're going to relieve sanctions on this new Syrian government. That was the right thing to do. If they don't hold true on their commitments, then you impose the sanctions again, but you have to give them a chance. And so Trump's instinct to say, hey, I'm gonna go and negotiate this, isn't a bad thing. I've said, deal with Iran, you have too. Deal with, you know, go into Syria and relieve the sanctions there, give them the chance to move forward. Those are good things, but there needs to be some underlying strategic principle and sometimes that's absent from the moves of the president.

I do want to ask a little bit about your time in Turkey, because you were appointed ambassador by President Biden in display of bipartisanship. How did that come about?

You know, it used to be that presidents of any party would appoint a few people at least from the opposite party to their cabinet or to important ambassadorships. That's kind of fallen out of favor. President Trump in his first term didn't name any Democrats. President Biden named, I think, myself, and that was Cindy McCain as well. I think that's important that there are some. And I, early on when President Biden won, I got a call from the White House asking if I would consider. A post, I said, well, as long as it's consequential, consequential country, and they overshot the mark by quite a bit, you know? Sometimes, my wife and I would sit there thinking, you know, New Zealand, you now? That's it, that's it. But I wanted a country that was consequential and it certainly was. And Turkey, it's an extremely important relationship and I'm glad, we were glad to be there. The president named another ambassador who arrived a few weeks ago, and he's doing a good job.

With President Biden, much has been made even here today about his decline and to what extent the inner circle shielded the rest of the party and the American public from that. Did you ever have an encounter with the president that made you question his mental acuity?

Well, I was often, as I mentioned, as an ambassador, sometimes you need a presidential touch. Tony Blinken was awesome. I dealt with him, worked with him for years when I was in the House and the Senate, and he was very competent. Sometimes you need the president to call. And there were a couple of times where I got that. It was tough to get, more difficult than it would have been with perhaps a president Who was younger or healthier. What do you mean? But, well, I mean, it's, I mean it's in some countries like Turkey with everything going on there, there was need for a lot of calls. Sometimes President Erdogan only wants to speak with the President of the United States. Sometimes you have to deliver that. I did get those calls. Sometimes it wasn't as important what was said on the call as the fact that the call happened. Right. And we were able to get some of those, and anyway...

But did you get the sense he was still sharp and with whatever was going on at the time?

Uh... Yeah i had i had concerns i think everyone in terms of but uh... But i like i said there were times that uh... By needed as ambassador presidential call and i got it and uh... So i was thankful for that

So you were never denied a meeting or anything like that?

No, no, it wasn't that. And the president, it would have been nice. We would have loved to have hosted the president. As the vice president, he'd been to Turkey, but would have then been great. Our European alliances, particularly when there's a war going on there, why they need to see the president and President Biden traveled some, it would've been nice if he could have traveled more. But yeah, you need that. You need that touch. And I was glad that I was able to get it.

Well, on this question of, you know, age, when you first ran for Congress, you said you would limit yourself to no more than three terms. You eventually backtracked on that. But the conversation around President Biden's decline and other lawmakers who have shown decline and yet continue to stay in office year after year has kind of reinforced this idea among critics that there should be term limits in Congress, that the people that are making the most important decisions about the country are just... Too old in some cases. Do you think that there should be term limits in Congress?

No, I used to think that that would be a good idea. I do think that some senators and members of the House go far beyond when they should. I served with some that I felt that way, but then I also served with someone like my colleague John McCain who was there until he was, I think, 81, and I was glad for every minute he was there. So I don't know that there's an arbitrary limit that we ought to push, but I think voters ought to be aware. You know, more discriminating sometimes when somebody is coming for another term when they're clearly enfeebled. And then we've had that happen. So I don't think that we ought to put a mandatory or arbitrary limit.

Well, on the Republican side, you wrote in your book, Conscious of a Conservative, back in 2017, that it wasn't enough at that point to be a conservative. You had to be angry about it. And there are some Republicans out there, though, who are not quite as angry as others about certain things. I'm thinking about former Vice President Mike Pence, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. They might code, at least, as more common sense conservatives. You know, you could look at their. Actual policy prescriptions and maybe quibble with that, but I guess now that they might be weighing next steps as we get closer to midterms and beyond, do you have any advice for how they should approach grabbing that group of folks from the middle that you talk about?

Well, no, I'm not in office, so I may not be the one to be giving advice for somebody who wants to gain office. But I do think, and I'm out quite a bit meeting with people, that I do know that there is a vast group of people who don't believe in grievance politics, who believe that, you know, if you stand for principle, you don't have to be angry about it. Mike Pence, his saying. During my entire time, and we were elected at the same time in Congress in 2000, was I'm a conservative, but I'm just not angry about it. That was his theme, and Mike Pence is a very conservative person, but now he is seen, and I'm often called, a moderate. I was never called a moderate when I was in the House or the Senate. I was a Neanderthal conservative, and I still consider myself traditionally very conservative, but. But to be conservative has now been equated with being angry and engaging in grievance politics. And that's just not for me.

'Did any of those names I mentioned strike you as like strong candidates? Like, I guess I'm wondering about a post-Trump future. What does it look like to you? You know, who is kind of leading the charge? Is that being talked about right now? Ha ha.

Yeah, quietly, in quiet rooms, not so much up front. And you mentioned earlier there, what motivation would there be for somebody to follow my advice and to stand up and remind our allies, you know, we'll be back. There's not much incentive right now. There really isn't. I tell you, going home to a district meeting or a town hall in most districts, you know people who want reelection in a primary and that's a problem with the system we have now. The primary is the subset of a subset of the subset of voters in either the Democratic Party or Republican Party electing somebody who would be in the general. And so I do think that there are people, probably governors around that don't engage as much in the partisan politics of the day who can assume that role. And I do you think Americans at some point, my party will say enough with grievance politics, let's get back to governing. Uh... Because we're going to need people who govern let's just take the right now here we have at the big beautiful bill yes is before that the congress now

It's the official title by the way.

Yeah, it is, but if you look at that, it increases the deficit over 10 years by a huge amount. My party, the party of limited government, we can't continue to do that. And so I think voters are going to need to see some honesty here. We're going to have to tackle those issues, but people are going have to come forward in a sober manner, not angry, but saying... And here's what we're going to have to do. So I do think there's going to be room for that.

Um... LAUGHTER

Well, I do think some things that will change in the coming months, we've passed the hundred days now. Any president, particularly with control over the House and the Senate, is at their peak in terms of power. Now we're past that. Now members of Congress, I can tell you, having been one for 18 years, then you look to the midterms and you say, who am I more afraid of, my voters? Or the president, or is it both, or whatever, but they're gonna be concerned about election. And those incentives that I was just talking about to deal with our broader fiscal problems, those aren't playing right now. It's just until we come to some crisis, they won't be. But I can tell you the effect of tariffs, tariffs are inflationary, there's no way around it. And to the extent, if the president is successful, with tariffs, in imposing higher tariffs, then it's going to mean higher prices. And that's going be a difficult pill for voters to swallow. So there will be different motivations for members of Congress to look at over the next year and a half.

Yeah, I was going to ask the midterms, how much will they be able to tell us about where the party goes forward? Or is it because Trump will still be there, you know, endorsing, doing all that stuff, like what we'll be able learn from it, do you think?

No, a large amount, and even before that, you have in Virginia and New Jersey, coming up in November you have elections, and those are always bellwethers as to where the country is going. So, yeah, that'll tell us a lot. And then, let's face it, the president, this is his last term. As much as he hints or jokes about it, this his last turn. Republican party knows that. He'll have people who want to imitate his style of politics. But let me tell you. That hasn't been very successful for others. President Trump has done it masterfully. He really has, in terms of politically. But his imitators haven't. Take those in Arizona, for Kerry Lake, running for the House, I'm sorry, the Senate and governorship, both times with the president's endorsement and acting just like him. People excuse it with the President, but not for other candidates. And so...

So you think it's kind of really a singular, individual effect?

I do. And I'm not suggesting that the party hasn't changed at all. It has. It has. But he is a singular individual and there have been, nobody has been successful in imitating his style of politics on a national scale and even in most states.

Thanks for watching.

Before we go, I have to ask you, do you have any plans to run for office again? It's just you and me, you don't have to worry about that. I don't even think they're recording this.

It's tough to see a place. I served 18 years in Congress. That's a good time. And I'm not saying I'll never serve in any capacity. I'd love to. For either as a member of my own party or appointed by the other side. We live in a wonderful country and we have wonderful institutions. There is value in public service and those of us who are on college campuses are, you know, begging the younger generation. It is noble to either run for office, to serve on a staff, to work on campaigns or do advocacy work, do nonprofit work. Public service is good and noble. And I fear that many in the younger generation will see the vitriol that's happening out there and just say, that's not for me.

Right, why would I want to get involved in that mess?

Exactly. And so that's important. I'd love to serve in some way again. I don't know if it will be an elected office.

Okay, fair enough. Ambassador Flake, thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Thank you

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Matt Martinez, Felicia Patinkin, and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager, Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN audio. We get support from Alex Manasseri, Mark Duffy, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to David Chalian, Nick Robertson, David Wright, and Wendy Brundage. We'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.