Bob Corker at Trump rally: ‘He wants the best for you’
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Bob Corker met privately with Donald Trump for a second time on Tuesday and then joined the presumptive GOP presidential candidate at a campaign rally in North Carolina amid speculation that Trump is close to picking his vice presidential running mate.
“I wasn’t going to say anything — I just came to visit,” Corker told the cheering crowd as he strolled onto the stage alongside Trump at the campaign event in Raleigh.
But the Chattanooga Republican, who is considered a potential running mate for Trump, said after spending the day with the New York real-estate mogul, his family and work associates, he had come to see why Trump is beloved by his followers.
“The reason you love him so much is because he loves you,” Corker said. “He loves you, and he wants the best for you.”
Trump returned the praise, calling Corker “a great friend of mine, somebody respected by everybody.”
Corker’s meeting with Trump, his second in just six weeks, and his subsequent appearance alongside Trump at the campaign rally will almost certainly ratchet up speculation that the senator could be joining the GOP ticket as Trump’s vice presidential pick.
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Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has tried to downplay the speculation that he is in the running for vice president and has said he has no reason to believe he’s being considered.
But The Washington Post, citing two unnamed Republican sources familiar with the search process, reported Tuesday that Corker recently submitted documents to A.B. Culvahouse, the Tennessee native and Washington, D.C., lawyer who is vetting Trump’s potential running mates. The Post said Corker is emerging as a finalist for the vice presidential slot and that he has been in close touch with Trump advisers.
Trump is expected to announce his running mate before the Republican National Convention kicks off in Cleveland on July 18.
“If Donald Trump picks Sen. Corker as his vice presidential choice, it will strengthen the ticket and be a popular decision,” former Knoxville Mayor Victor Ashe said. "Bob's record as a mayor, commissioner of finance in state government and U.S. senator is exceptional. He would be an outstanding vice president."
Speculation that Corker might be in the running for the No. 2 spot on the GOP ticket started shortly after he told USA TODAY in early May he had offered to help Trump develop a foreign policy platform and stands ready to assist the presumptive nominee in the general election.
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Later that month, Corker had a private, hour-long meeting with Trump at Trump Tower in New York. Corker described the meeting as a chance for the two to get to know each other better and said they talked about foreign policy issues.
Tuesday’s meeting also was held in New York a few hours before the campaign rally in Raleigh. Corker then flew to the campaign event with Trump.
At the campaign event, Corker said he’d had “a pretty remarkable day” with Trump.
In political campaigns, he said, candidates often “become caricatures of what the media makes them,” and that after the election “people realize they never really knew the person.”
But, he said, “it says a lot about a person to meet their family, spend time with their kids if you will and to be around the people that have worked in the Trump organization for 25 and 30 years, to see the respect they have for the person they have worked with … to see how he treats people around him.”
From Chattanooga mayor to possible VP: Bob Corker's rise to prominence
Corker, a former Chattanooga mayor and Tennessee’s junior senator, has seen his stature grow considerably on the national and international stage in the year and a half since he took over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Time magazine named him last year to its annual list of the world's 100 most influential people, alongside world leaders such as President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
During his 10 years in the Senate, Corker has blazed a moderate-to-conservative trail. He aroused the ire of tea partiers around the country in 2013 with his work on immigration reform, an issue Trump has made a central theme of his campaign.
Trump has called for immigration reform “that serves the interest and values of America” and has said he would suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States and its allies.
But in 2013, right-wing critics charged that the immigration legislation Corker worked on amounted to “amnesty” for immigrants who arrived in the U.S. illegally — a characterization that Corker vigorously denied.
An amendment crafted by Corker and Sen. John Hoeven, R-North Dakota, doubled the number of border patrol agents on the Mexican border, doubled the length of new fencing there, expanded the number of work visas for highly skilled workers and, controversially, established a long and arduous “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. but denied them federal benefits until then.
Undocumented immigrants who had arrived before 2012 could apply for registered provisional immigrant status if they met certain criteria. After 10 years and more criteria, they could apply to become permanent residents and three years later could apply for citizenship, which was not automatic. The bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support but was never voted on by the GOP-dominated House of Representatives.
In a civic club speech the next year, Corker chastised critics of the bill.
“I get really frustrated with people on my side of the aisle who say that anything you do on immigration is amnesty,” he said.
He suggested that doing nothing with the status quo looks more like “amnesty” than a process that takes at least 13 years or longer to apply for citizenship.