“You know, sadly, Senator Corker hasn’t called me, but if he’d like to visit, I’d be happy to talk to him and certainly see if we could get him back on board and do, frankly, what the people of Tennessee elected him to do,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images White House tells Corker: Stop 'name calling and get back to work'

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday left the door open to speak with Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, a retiring Republican lawmaker who has openly criticized President Donald Trump in recent weeks.

In an interview Tuesday morning with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Sanders lamented Corkers’ lack of outreach to patch things up with the White House.


“You know, sadly, Senator Corker hasn’t called me, but if he’d like to visit, I’d be happy to talk to him and certainly see if we could get him back on board and do, frankly, what the people of Tennessee elected him to do,” Sanders said. “That’s come here, help do things that protect our country, protect our citizens and do a lot of the things that they campaigned on, whether it’s repeal and replace, tax reform.”

And she offered one bit of advice: “Hopefully, he’ll get out of the name calling and get back to work here pretty soon,” she said.

Corker has gotten calls from Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. But the senator — who has said the president concerns him, warned that the president’s tweets could lead to “World War III,” accused the president of castrating his secretary of state, called the White House an “adult daycare center,” suggested the president lacks stability and competence, and hinted that without his top advisers, Trump would bring chaos to the world — hasn’t heard directly from Trump and doesn’t know when he will.

“As always, some occasion will rise,” he told POLITICO on Monday. “I’ll be here another 15 months. I gotta believe I’ll talk to the president again.”

For his part, Trump has claimed that Corker “begged” for his endorsement and decided not to run when the president rebuffed him. The president also said the Tennessee Republican, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is “a negative voice,” nicknamed him “Liddle’ Bob Corker,” claimed he sounded like “a fool” in his interview with The New York Times and suggested he can’t “get the job done.”

Corker’s office has said Trump asked the senator to run for reelection four times, including earlier this month, and noted that Corker encouraged the Times to record the interview.