JAMES HOHMANN: Flake and Corker feel liberated to speak their minds. That should terrify Trump.

But a much better outcome for President Trump would have been if Flake ran and lost in the primary. Public and private polls showed that he was deeply vulnerable to a challenge from anyone aligned with the administration.

Flake was building up a serious campaign apparatus, and his advisers were telling him that he had to be cautious. If he had decided to take his chances, the senator’s critiques of Trump would have been very measured. If he subsequently lost in a primary, it would be much easier for the president’s allies to dismiss future attacks as sour grapes from a senator scorned.

— Flake’s decision to retire means that he gets to leave the Senate on his own terms and apparently that entails going full “Bulworth.”

In an op-ed for The Post, Flake explains that he decided not to seek reelection in order “to remove all considerations of what is normally considered to be safe politically.”

“For the next 14 months, relieved of the strictures of politics, I will be guided only by the dictates of conscience,” he promises. “It’s time we all say: Enough.”

I fail to see how a Republican Senator who has annoyed his own constituents so much that he doomed himself in the coming primary becomes somehow more powerful now that he has no constituency at all.

P.S. Bulworth’s outspoken antics won him his primary, James.