The conservative columnist Ross Douthat published a sober plea to use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. He just cannot be trusted with nukes, he argued.

But Flake is different.

“As a Republican member of Congress, he is declaring Trump a domestic and international menace,” a New York Times review of his forthcoming book declares. “Other conservatives in the news media and strategist class have been saying just this for well over a year, of course, but they don’t depend on a radicalized base to keep their jobs. Flake is the first elected official to cross this particular rhetorical Rubicon, and he seems to be imploring his colleagues to follow. He offers a despairing, unsparing indictment of everyone in Congress who went along with Trump’s election.”

Flake put it this way in the book: “We pretended that the emperor wasn’t naked.”

For all that, he doesn’t call for impeaching Trump.“So, where should Republicans go from here?” he asks in his excerpt, building to a mild conclusion. “First, we shouldn’t hesitate to speak out if the president ‘plays to the base’ in ways that damage the Republican Party’s ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.”

That’s rather restrained given how much damage a president can do.

In this, Flake’s thinking tracks a recent column by George Will, the Never Trump conservative, who attempted a measure of optimism. Trump is “a feeble president whose manner can cure the nation’s excessive fixation with the presidency,” Will argued, briefly tracing the growth of executive power. “Fortunately, today’s president is so innocent of information that Congress cannot continue deferring to executive policymaking,” he added. “And because this president has neither a history of party identification nor an understanding of reciprocal loyalty, congressional Republicans are reacquiring a constitutional—a Madisonian—ethic. It mandates a prickly defense of institutional interests, placing those interests above devotion to parties that allow themselves to be defined episodically by their presidents.”

Will is urging the nation to take the punishment that is coming as a penance for civic sins. “For now, worse is better,” he wrote. “Diminution drains this office of the sacerdotal pomposities that have encrusted it. There will be 42 more months of this president’s increasingly hilarious-beyond-satire apotheosis of himself, leavened by his incessant whining about his tribulations (‘What dunce saddled me with this silly attorney general who takes my policy expostulations seriously?’). This protracted learning experience, which the public chose to have and which should not be truncated, might whet the public’s appetite for an adult president confident enough to wince at, and disdain, the adoration of his most comically groveling hirelings.”