Jeff Flake Blames Voters For Retirement, ‘I Could Not Win In A Republican Primary’ [VIDEO]

Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake blamed GOP primary voters for his exit from politics and said he would never have been able to win his primary race, Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“I could not win in a Republican primary. That’s the bottom line,” Flake said. “It’s not that you just have to meet with the president on policy. You cannot question the president and still be a good Republican.”

“I’m not sure when that transformation happened, but all of the sudden I’m a RINO. Republican in name only,” he added. “Politics have changed quiet a bit. That’s all I can say.”

Flake admitted he was never on the same page as the Trump campaign or the administration and said politics are changing to reward anger instead of compromise.

“I didn’t get off on the right foot with the administration back in the campaign,” he said. “It seems now to be conservative you have to be angry, and its a different type of politics then we are used to.”

Flake said it was wrong of primary voters to want their Senator to stand unified with the president, and said they were normalizing Trump’s erratic behavior.

“In poll after poll you’ll see that a majority of Republican primary voters … are firmly behind the president’s policies,” Flake said.  “We’re entering a time where we’re normalizing behavior we shouldn’t normalize — it’s just not going to be good for the country.”

Flake called Trump’s style and speech “reckless” and “undignified” and accused Trump supporters of being complicit in the president’s negative behavior.

“We are excusing undignified and outrageous and reckless speech and behavior as telling it like it is,” Flake said. “I think we ought to say this is speech that is reckless and it’s undignified. And until we do we are complicit in normalizing that kind of behavior.”