Sen. Jeff Flake may be retiring from the Senate but his near retirement hasn’t reigned in his public persona. Flake has been in a year long audition process for CNN or MSNBC or possibly even to challenge Trump for the Presidency in 2020.

In a speech at the National Press Club on Thursday the outgoing senator said that the Republican Party, his party, should not be leading the United States.

“If we are going to cloister ourselves in the alternative truth of an erratic leader, if we are going to refuse to live in a world that everyone else lives in … then my party might not deserve to lead,” he said, CNN reported.

“If one voice can do such profound damage to our values and to our civic life,” he added. “then one voice can also repair the damage, one voice can call us to a higher idea of America, one voice can act as a beacon to help us find ourselves once again after this terrible fever breaks — and it will break.”

“Never has a party abandoned, fled its principles and deeply held beliefs so quickly as my party did in the face of the nativist juggernaut,” the senator said. “We have become strangers to ourselves.”

There is another motive, other than auditioning for cable news, that could be driving the Arizona senator.

He has said in recent weeks that he wants to have a Republican challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential primary.

It would be a move unprecedented in modern times, but it would not be shocking.

The establishment of both parties has been rocked by President Trump’s election and have been having a tantrum for more than a year.

They cannot stand the fact that the voters gave them, what is tantamount to, a middle finger in 2016 and now they want their revenge.

Sen. Flake continued his tirade on Friday when he spoke at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, coincidentally the state that hosts the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

“It has not been in my plans to run for president, but I have not ruled it out,” he said.

“I’m not ruling that out, either,” he said. “There are going to be a lot of other people in the party looking for something else.”

“If you end up with Trump on one side, (Bernie) Sanders or (Elizabeth) Warren on the other, there’s a huge swath of voters in the middle that make an independent run by somebody a lot more realistic,” he said.

The translation, he is running for president.