December 09, 2016 01:51 PM UTC

Cory Gardner: From Trump Critic To Trump Toady

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• by: Colorado Pols

What a difference an unexpected win makes, as the Colorado Springs Gazette’s Joey Bunch reports:

Cory Gardner once called Donald Trump a “buffoon” and even called for him to drop out of the presidential race a month before the election, but the U.S. senator from Yuma is now busy handing out olive branches to the administration.

Thursday Gardner, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, met with South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump’s likely nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations…

This week Gardner also has had facetime with billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, the proposed commerce secretary, and former George W. Bush administration labor secretary Elaine Chao, Trump’s proposed nominee to head transportation—a key contact for Colorado, which needs billions of dollars in highway aid.

It’s not like anyone should have expected Sen. Cory Gardner to stand by the alleged principles that led him to call for President-elect Donald Trump to pull out of the race in early October, but Gardner’s whiplash-inducing turnabout on Trump since the election is one of the only public signs of a very difficult problem the upwardly-mobile Gardner’s rejection of Trump created in the wake of Trump’s victory.

It’s true that basically every Republican who abandoned Trump during the campaign (or never supported him at all) has had to “kiss the ring” since Election Day, but Gardner’s very public calls for Trump to pull out of the race puts him in a position where he needs to work overtime to ingratiate himself with the new regime. Which isn’t a problem for Gardner, who has built his political career on switching sides when expedient–from a Democrat to a hard-right Republican Congressman to America’s fakest champion of birth control.

If anything, it would be nice to not have Gardner’s acrobatics so breezily glossed over by the local political press. Perhaps the only thing more unprecedented than the speed with which Gardner switches his loyalties is how no one seems to question it.