The following article by Jesse Byrnes was posted on the Hill website December 8, 2017:
Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) chided President Trump in a tweet Friday night after the president asserted that the U.S. has a “rigged system.”
“This is not a sick system, Mr. President, nor is it a rigged system. Let’s not sow distrust in our democratic institutions,” Flake tweeted.
The GOP senator was responding to Trump’s comments during a rally in Pensacola, Fla., earlier Friday night when Trump responded to chants of “lock her up” by citing the “rigged system.”
“It’s being proven we have a rigged system. Doesn’t happen so easy,” Trump said. “But this system — gonna be a lot of changes. This is a rigged system.”
“This is a sick system from the inside. And there’s no country like our country, but we have a lot of sickness in some of our institutions,” he continued.
“We’re working very hard, we’ve got a lot of them straightened out, but we do have, we really do, we have a rigged system in this country and we have to change it.”
Flake, a frequent critic of Trump, sat next to the president during a meeting at the White House earlier this week with other Republican senators to discuss trade.
During the meeting, Trump made a plug for Alabama Senate GOP candidate Roy Moore, who has faced allegations of sexual misconduct from multiple women who say he pursued them when they were teenagers.
Flake, who announced earlier this fall that he would not seek reelection, said that a Moore victory would be “no victory for the nation.”
View the post here.