Sanford Falls in Primary; Corker on Cult-Like Situation; GOP Won't Endorse Stewart
KING: Welcome back. To politics now. A powerful midterm message delivered last night in a primary night that did a lot more than just pick candidates for the November ballot. Congressman Mark Sanford, soon to be former Congressman Mark Sanford, which makes him exhibit a as Republicans in Washington now debate challenging the president on trade, crossing him on immigration, or schooling him that a few hours in the same room as Kim Jong-un does not make a nuclear arsenal disappear. Sanford was Tea Party before there was a Tea Party. As a congressman, then South Carolina governor, then congressman again, railing against fellow Republicans who called themselves conservatives but vote routinely for bloated budgets. But he also chastises the president's tweets and his tantrums and he dares to say aloud that the grand old party is now a cult of personality, no longer the home of conservative policy and principles. For that, Sanford lost his primary last night.</s>REP. MARK SANFORD (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: It may have cost me an election in this case, but I stand by every one of those decisions to disagree with the president, because I didn't think, at the end of the day, was either concurrent with the promises I made when I first ran for office, or the voices of the very people of the first district that I represent.</s>KING: Katie Arrington is the winner. She campaigned promising loyalty to the president and won a final hours endorsement tweet as Air Force One was flying back from Singapore.</s>KATIE ARRINGTON (R), SOUTH CAROLINA CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: Joe Cunningham and the D.C. Democrats are the party of Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren. We are the party of President Donald J. Trump. We are the party of Senator Tim Scott. And now, Congressman Katie Arrington.</s>KING: Joining our conversation, Olivier Knox from Sirius XM, Molly Ball with "Time." This is a big deal. Mark Sanford is a Republican. Mark Sanford is a conservative. Mark Sanford is to the right of almost everybody. It's pretty hard to find somebody who gets to the right of Mark Sanford when it comes to voting on taxes and spending and balancing budgets. Mark Sanford just got thumped because he dared to stand up to the president.</s>MATTINGLY: And then said he didn't regret anything that he said, which underscores why he ended up getting thumped. Look, I think if you look more broadly at the campaign, clearly he was taken by surprise on this. He didn't start his major spend until late. Katie Arrington ran a good, solid race, actually had the backing of some state legislators that had run crosswise with Sanford over the years when he was governor. So there was some help there. It wasn't as clean cut maybe as it appears. But the reality is this -- and we see it in the polling, you see it when you talk to members on The Hill, you see it when complicated issues come up or, frankly, tweets that you would think would rub somebody the wrong way. President Trump runs the Republican Party, and President Trump's voters are the people that will elect Republicans to the Senate or to the United States Congress. It's why you see Republican leaders have the posture they have. It's why you see Mitch McConnell having the posture to some degree on trade right now on the issue. The interesting element with Mark Sanford is, to your point, he was to the right of everybody. He is a favorite of the House Freedom Caucuses, one of the closest groups, conservative groups to President Trump, but he never held his tongue. And I know this because I went to him often during debates and after tweets to get his response to them. And, frankly, he paid for it on primary night.</s>KING: It's interesting. You go back a few years. Mark Sanford and Jeff Flake, two guys who will now be formers, they were sort of the guys on the right poking their own leadership for not sticking to conservative principles. I remember when they thought Newt Gingrich was kind of liberal, maybe a socialist. And now they're gone. They're gone. And listen to Bob Corker, always more of a centrist, from Tennessee, the senator here. Bob Corker's also not running because he had a Trump problem. Listen to what Senator Corker told our Manu Raju just a short time ago.</s>SEN. BOB CORKER (R), TENNESSEE: We're in a strange place. I mean it's almost, you know, been a -- it's becoming a cultish thing, isn't it? And it's not a good place for any party to end up with a cult-like situation as it relates to a president that happens to be of -- purportedly of the same party.</s>KING: Cult-like?</s>HENDERSON: Yes, I mean, this is after the whole adult daycare thing. He basically tweeted that, you know, that that's what the situation in the White House was, and the president was, you know, acting like a child. But he's not running. Flake's not running. All of these people who've decided to speak their minds in terms of Trump are having a tough time. Even somebody like Arrington down in South Carolina, she was originally a Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio Republican. She backed Marco Rubio in 2016. And she's learned, at least in that district, at least in that state of South Carolina, that being vociferously with Trump is a boon to your chances. And, of course, she won and she'll be the next congressman.</s>OLIVIER KNOX, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, SIRIUS XM: This is also fueled by Bob Corker's efforts to get legislation empowering Congress to roll back President Trump's tariff decisions. He had quite a -- a parathion (ph) on the Senate floor yesterday. He was very, very unhappy with the fact that he was denied a vote. So that's --</s>KING: Right, because if they took a vote in a private room, almost every Republican would agree with him.</s>HENDERSON: Right.</s>KNOX: This is -- this is --</s>KING: But they're not going to take a vote in public when it matters because it will P.O. the president.</s>KNOX: Right. This is -- this is one of the interesting challenges I think here because if they're not going to take a vote, it tells me that they would lose people and that the -- the Republicans might end up siding with enough Democrats to actually try to roll back these tariffs. The trade question is really -- is a really good one because you actually see attention between supporting the president and local/regional economic interests. So this is why you saw it blocked. But that's part of what's animating Bob Corker here, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman. Very, very upset that he did not get his legislation</s>KING: Some of it is that. There are personal interests in their trade (ph). But he believes Senator Corker would say that's also a principle issue for the party. But this is Donald Trump's party, without a doubt. Now, the president didn't win across the board. His candidate, the South Carolina governor, has to go in a run-off. A lot of people think that's because he was appointed. He took over when Nikki Haley left and voters tend to make you earn it, if you will. But in Virginia, the Republicans have nominated the guy who was Trump before Trump, and then was a Trump activist in the campaign, Corey Stewart, to run against Tim Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton's running mate as vice president. Corey Gardner, Republican senator from Colorado, who runs the Senatorial Campaign Committee, just said -- just told CNN, the campaign committee will not endorse Corey Stewart. The president congratulated Corey Stewart. The president says Corey Stewart is great. Senator Gardner saying we have a big map. Right now we're focused on Florida, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana. I don't see Virginia in it. That's picking a fight with the president, isn't it?</s>MOLLY BALL, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, "TIME": Well, I don't think that's his intention. I think he would rather avoid that. And, look, he is also stating a fact. Almost any candidate who would emerge from this Virginia Republican primary would have had a very tough time against Senator Tim Kaine. The others on the ballot, one was at least as interesting as Corey Stewart, and the other had very little name recognition. So I think that Virginia was not a top priority for Republicans any way. This is a state that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. And in a midterm year, when Republicans expect their prospects to be even worse than that, substantially worse than that, it's hard -- it would have been an uphill fight. But, yes, I mean a lot of Republicans really cringe at the rhetoric and positioning of Corey Stewart, you know, talking about this issue of, is the Republican Party a vehicle for a certain set of beliefs, a certain set of principles, like free trade, like fiscal responsibility, or is it about the leadership of Donald Trump and electing a supportive group of people. Look, if Republican voters felt like the most important thing was so- called conservative principles, they had a lot of candidates to choose from in 2016. That's clearly not what they prioritized. And you can say, you know, that in a way Trump is exhibiting leadership over the party by moving it in his direction I think would be the nicer way to put it than saying that it's a cult of personality. But that is clearly what the voters want and the question is, you know, how does that play for the rest of the party to have a candidate like Corey Stewart be part -- be representing them. I think in Virginia, where I live, and which I've covered pretty closely, the party feels like that is not a good look and they wish that they could kind of disown this guy.</s>MATTINGLY: And I think that's a key -- the key, key point of Senator Gardner's position on this, right, is that he knows that whatever Corey Stewart says for the next five months is going to immediately be drawn back to the other candidates in those four or five states that he listed, or key races. I will note, Senator Stewart was one of the first people out -- sorry, Senator Gardner was one of the first people out on Judge Roy Moore, said that -- went the furthest saying they didn't even want him in the conference. So this isn't necessarily a shift in that perspective, but he's looking at this broadly and recognizing what Mr. Stewart would bring to his candidates throughout the next couple months.</s>KING: We'll discuss this race more another day. But if you're Barbara Comstock, a venerable Republican in the D.C. suburbs, and you think Corey Stewart is going to invite President Trump into Virginia to campaign for you, OK, we're going to have a fun election year. Here we go. Up next for us here, you can rest easy tonight. The North Korea nuclear threat, gone. That's according to the president. His secretary of state says, it might take a little longer than that.