Senator Bob Corker criticized President Trump for "nontruthtellin" and name-calling, claiming that "the debasement of our nation will be what he'll be remembered most for." Following is a transcript of the video.
Senator Bob Corker: Much of what he says is untrue. Certainly people here are because these things are provably untrue. They're just factually incorrect and people know the difference. So I don't know why he lowers himself to such a low, low standard and debases our country in the way that he does, but he does. And I don't like responding, you can let him go unanswered, but it's just not me. We don't do tweets like that, we responded twice to, again, untruths, but it's unfortunate that our nation finds itself in this place.
The president has great difficulty with the truth on many issues.
He's proven himself unable to rise to the occasion. I think many of us, me included, have tried to ... I've intervened, I've had private dinner, I've been with him on multiple occasions to try to create some kind of aspirational approach, if you will, to the way that he conducts himself but I don't think that that's possible. He's obviously not going to rise to the occasion as president.
But I think at the end of the day, when his term is over, I think the debasing of our nation, the constant nontruthtelling, the name-calling ... I think the debasement of our nation will be what he'll be remembered most for and that's regretful. And it affects young people. We have young people who for the first time are watching a president stating absolute nontruths nonstop, personalizing things in the way that he does and it's very sad for our nation.
The shame of it is there are some really good people around him and if he would stay out of their way and let them perform, people like Tillerson and Mattis and others, we could really make progress on the things that matter lately to our country.