Roberts: Jeff Flake says truth needs allies. Amen, but where are they?

Jeff Flake may be giving up his Senate seat, but he’s holding firm to something ultimately far more elusive in Washington – and ultimately far more important.

His principles.

Flake on Wednesday delivered a blistering rebuke to President Donald Trump for his sustained campaign to undermine the media … and the truth.

"2017 was a year which saw the truth – objective, empirical, evidence-based truth – more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government," Flake told his Senate colleagues.

Flake has been fighting this for a while

Flake has been one of the few Republicans – along with Sen. John McCain – who has been willing to stand up to Trump and to the president's enablers. In other words: most of his own party.

Who can forget his introduction to the then-surging presidential candidate, when he said: “I’m the other senator from Arizona – the one who didn’t get captured – and I want to talk to you about statements like that.”

READ:Full text of Flake's speech

Rather than grabbing a flag and running to join Trump’s parade, Flake picked up a pen and wrote a book, warning about the dangerous direction this particular procession is headed and chastising his colleagues for not speaking truth to power.

In October, after 10 months of Trump – the threats, the attacks, the fundamental disregard for truth – Flake announced he wouldn’t be seeking re-election. Of course, Flake likely couldn’t be elected anyway.

He's out of step with the faction now in control of the Republican Party. The ones who excuse every shameful thing this president has said – chief among them his campaign to undermine the free press that is vital to our democracy.

Or as Trump calls us, “the enemy of the people.”

“It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies,” Flake said Wednesday. “It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase ‘enemy of the people,’ that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of ‘annihilating such individuals’ who disagreed with the supreme leader."

Who will speak up once Flake's gone?

Which is, of course, precisely what Trump has done in a figurative sense. The world's most powerful person uses his position and his Twitter account to verbally annihilate anyone who dares to question him.

In Trump’s world, his inauguration crowd was the largest ever, he lost the popular vote because of massive fraud, Robert Mueller is a bad actor, and any suggestion that his campaign might have conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election? A hoax.

And anything with which he disagrees: fake news.

Down is up and right is wrong and nothing and nobody can be believed.

Nobody, that is, but Trump.

"The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign,” Flake said. “They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated.”

Flake called once again on his fellow senators to take a stand, noting that a “free press is the despot’s enemy.”

 "2018 must be the year in which the truth takes a stand against power that would weaken it. In this effort, the choice is quite simple. And in this effort, the truth needs as many allies as possible," he said.

Only don't look for those allies to come flocking to Flake's side – not in Washington and certainly not in Arizona, where the three Republicans who seek to replace him are frantically chasing a Trump endorsement.

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