Trump's 'tweet-off' with Sen. Corker

In a Tweet-off on Sunday, President Trump went after the escalating vocal critic of his administration, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). 

Trump said Corker gutlessly dropped his re-election bid after begging him for an endorsement in which he said 'no.'

"Corker 'begged' me to endorse him," Trump said in a salvo of tweets. "I said 'NO' and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement). He also wanted to be secretary of state, I said 'NO THANKS.' . . . Hence, I would fully expect Corker to be a negative voice and stand in the way of our great agenda. Didn't have the guts to run!"

Corker returned fire a few minutes later and tweeted: "It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning."

This attack by the president comes after Corker saying last week, that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will resign. He also said that Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly "are those people that help separate our country from chaos."

It wasn't always this way. Early in Trump's term the couple played golf together along with retired NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, another Tennessee native. 

Nobody saw it coming between Don and Bob (which also happens to be the name of a great hotdog joint in Rochester, NY).

But the relationship went south, at least publicly, in August, when Bob criticized Trump for how he handled the violent Charlottesville, Virginia protests, in which an alleged white supremacist plowed his car into the crowd and fatally struck a young woman.

Corker said the president has not demonstrated "the stability nor some of the competence" needed to be successful.

"You just put your lips together and blow"

On Sunday, Trump argued that Corker supported the Iran nuclear deal brokered by the Obama administration that Trump claims Iran is violating. Trump tweeted: "He is also largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal!" ending his sentence with his signature exclamation point.

In an August 2016 opinion piece in The Washington Times, Jed Babbin says that Corker "has a problem" when it comes to the Iran deal and that he basically caved in to the Obama administration when he served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 

So Trump is correct when he tweeted about Corker's involvement with the Iran deal. Whether or not Corker asked for his endorsement is a moot point--he probably did but we cannot know for certain.

What we know is that Corker has a belly-full of sour grapes and Trump is the cause. Like Hillary Clinton, Corker needs to bow out gracefully, but grace is beginning to seem like a very rare commodity in Washington D.C.



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