Trump predicts Flake will ‘go to work for CNN’

President Trump on Wednesday attacked Jeff Flake and several other GOP critics, saying the retiring Arizona senator is likely to go after him on CNN after leaving Congress.

“Jeff Flake is now selling real estate, or whatever he’s doing. He’ll probably go to work for CNN. That’s my prediction,” said Trump, who was a real estate mogul and reality TV star before entering politics.

Asked by The Hill before he left Washington for Christmas about whether he would be interested in having a political show on television, perhaps on MSNBC, Flake said he wasn’t.

{mosads}“I don’t want to work that hard,” he joked, acknowledging the grind of filling airtime on a daily basis.

Flake said he would be interested in serving on corporate boards and exploring other opportunities.

The Arizona senator wrote a book last year, “Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle,” which criticized Trump — and which some saw as a sign he might run in a primary against the president in 2020.

“He wrote a book about it. Didn’t work out too well, that book,” Trump said of Flake.

The president used Flake’s retirement as a cautionary tale for Sen.-elect Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who penned an op-ed this week attacking the president’s character.

“I don’t know if he’s going to become a team player,” Trump said. “I hope he does. If he does, I think it’s gonna be better for him. I think people are very upset with what he did.”

Trump also went after outgoing Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who clashed with the president before deciding not to seek reelection in the fall. Trump won Tennessee by a 26-percentage-point margin in 2016.

“Bob Corker, unfortunately, he and I had a good relationship and then he thought he was going to get some publicity for himself and his ratings tubed,” Trump said. “Bob Corker was gonna be a senator for another 20 years, and then for some reason, he hit me because he thought it was going to be good publicity. It didn’t work out too well.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman was often critical of Trump’s stances on Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Alexander Bolton contributed.