PARTY OF ONE
‘YOU WANNA SEE SOMETHING COOL?’ Senator Jeff Flake grins. “You guys are gonna love this.” He disappears into his clay-roofed garage in suburban Phoenix and returns wielding a pneumatic grapefruit gun, a three-foot-long contraption made of PVC pipe. Never mind that the 54-year-old Arizona Republican is in the throes of a minor medical emergency: minutes earlier on this November Friday, he’d been whacking through the desert shrubbery behind his house when he nicked his eyelid on a palm frond, causing it to bleed profusely. Now Flake’s 17-year-old son Dallin picks up a grapefruit from under the tree near their pool and loads it into the pipe, which is aimed skyward. With a blast that echoes across the neighborhood, the doomed fruit sails out of their backyard into parts unknown.
This is Jeff Flake in autumn: bloodied, liberated and feeling a bit mischievous. In a party whose elected officials vent privately about the tweets and tempests from the White House while toeing the line in public, Flake has been President Trump’s toughest critic. During the 2016 campaign, he was an outspoken opponent of Trump’s views on trade and immigration and his racially charged attacks on a Mexican-American judge. In August, he published a manifesto, Conscience of a Conservative, excoriating Trump and bemoaning the GOP’s evolution from a party founded on the ideals of small government, individual liberty and strong moral values to the far-right populism that has dominated in the Trump era. “It just wasn’t in me to agree with these simplistic policy prescriptions—protectionism, the Muslim ban,” Flake says. “Some of that is just the antithesis of what conservatives ought to be.”
His refusal to go along cost Flake his political career. As he lambasted his party’s President over the course of 2017, Flake’s favorability rating plunged, hitting just 22% in August, according to a poll by JMC
