"You know, it’s been building for a long time,” Sen Bob Corker said of him going public with critical comments of President Donald Trump. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo Corker: 'I gotta believe I’ll talk to the president again' The Tennessee senator, who has directly challenged Trump, says he doesn't know whether fences can be mended.

Bob Corker has received an array of calls from the Trump administration since blasting the president: from Vice President Mike Pence, from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

But nothing from President Donald Trump himself.


The Tennessee senator, who said in the past eight days that the president’s tweets could lead to “World War III” and that Trump had castrated Tillerson, said in an interview on Monday that he wasn’t sure when he’d talk next to Trump and whether or not there would be a real attempt to mend fences with the president. He seemed sanguine about what he had wrought: a sitting Republican senator voicing real and urgent concern about the president of his own party.

“As always, some occasion will rise,” Corker said. “I’ll be here another 15 months. I gotta believe I’ll talk to the president again.”

Corker is retiring after 2018, and is thus far the only senator to offer such a comprehensive and blunt critique of Trump. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) doesn’t like Trump’s decision to end Obamacare subsidies, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) dislikes the opacity to Trump’s military plans, but no one is joining Corker in blasting Trump’s “volatility” so forthrightly.

“I made the comments. I wasn’t expecting anything in particular,” Corker said of his public airing of grievances, which followed a series of more nuanced critiques intended to make Trump tone down some of his rhetoric. Corker said the White House is in a “downward spiral,” that the president needed to be more stable, that Tillerson was helping protect the world from “chaos.”

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It didn’t work, and Trump instead called Corker out on Twitter as begging for the president’s political support. So Corker called The New York Times while he “was driving down to the beach,” and said what’s been on his mind for weeks.

“You know, it’s been building for a long time,” he said. “It’s been building over the last four months. Many of the things I’ve said publicly. I’ve had private conversations, too. So that’s kind of where we are. It’s been a week. We’ll see.”

Asked what he thought of Trump's 40-minute news conference on Monday, in which he stated that other presidents didn’t often contact fallen soldiers, Corker said he hadn’t seen it.

“Was it good?” he asked.