Sen. Jeff Flake Jeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeJeff Flake: Republicans 'should hold the same position' on SCOTUS vacancy as 2016 Republican former Michigan governor says he's voting for Biden Maybe they just don't like cowboys: The president is successful, some just don't like his style MORE (R-Ariz.) hit the Republican Party on Thursday for its support of President Trump Donald John TrumpBiden leads Trump by 36 points nationally among Latinos: poll Trump dismisses climate change role in fires, says Newsom needs to manage forest better Jimmy Kimmel hits Trump for rallies while hosting Emmy Awards MORE, saying the party may not deserve to lead.

"If we are going to cloister ourselves in the alternative truth of an erratic leader, if we are going to refuse to live in the world that everyone else lives in and reckon with the daily reality that they face including the very real anxiety that they feel, then my party might not deserve to lead," Flake said in an address at the National Press Club.

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"There is no damage like the damage that a president can do," he continued. He said there is an "unpredictable storm" in the White House and his party has "amnesia" in the face of it.

"We have become strangers to ourselves even as we pretend everything is fine," he said of his own party.

The Arizona senator has become one of the president's fiercest Republican critics, blasting the president in a book published last summer and going as far as comparing him to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on the Senate floor.

"If one voice can do such profound damage to our values and to our civic life, then one voice can also repair the damage, one voice can call us to a higher idea of America, one voice can act as a beacon to help us find ourselves once again after this terrible fever breaks — and it will break," he said Thursday.

Flake announced last year he would retire from the Senate after his term ends.

The senator earlier this week called for a Republican to challenge Trump in the 2020 presidential elections.

"It would be a tough go in a Republican primary. The Republican Party is the Trump party right now. But that's not to say it will stay that way," he told NBC's Chuck Todd on Sunday.