By all rights, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., has been honest, measured and deliberate in his comments about the Trump administration in its first 10 months. When he felt there was constructive criticism to level, he made it. When there was praise to be handed out, he did it.
There was no grandiloquent language in either case.
For those who have followed Corker since his days as a businessman in Chattanooga, that pathway was not out of the ordinary.
Nevertheless, he was one of the few in the Republican Party to speak his mind about what is, fairly, only the future of the country.
On Sunday, having decided last month not to seek re-election to a third term, he dropped that measured tone in light of continued Twitter harping by Trump, who suggested the senator "didn't have the guts" to run again.
"It's a shame," the senator tweeted in a response worthy of the president to whom he was responding, "the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning."
That's not vintage Corker, but it indicated both a senator who is concerned about the tenor of the administration and someone who'd had something sharp stuck under his fingernail once too often.
In a later interview, he added that the president was treating his office like "a reality show" and making threats toward other countries that could set the nation "on the path to World War III." He also said "every single day at the White House" was "a situation of trying to contain him."
"He concerns me," Corker said. "He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation."
The Tennessee senator later returned to his measured tone in an interview with The New York Times, repeating several times that he likes the president and wished him "no harm."
That was the same Corker, who, as recently as Sept. 23, was quoted as saying his relationship with the president "has not changed in any way" and that Trump called often "to commiserate and shoot the breeze."
"We're two business guys who talk in blunt ways, and yet we continue to talk often and our relationship is like it has always been," he said.
We believe Trump and Corker both want better things for the country, but, despite their common backgrounds as businessmen, view their bully pulpit in different ways.
The president is the elephant in the room, trumpeting and braying and making all of the noise he can to get his point across. Corker is the patient elephant wrangler, trying to calm the elephant and the atmosphere.
To date, Trump has resisted wrangling and thus has charged around the room, knocking over furniture but not coming close to accomplishing anything major for the American people.
Sure, Democrats, still sore from their election loss, have resisted him at every turn, and Republicans have been far from unified. But the president refuses to be tamed.
Corker, who also said last month the White House appears to be more focused under Marine Gen. John F. Kelley as chief of staff, may have been trying to send a message.
Even more focus is needed.
More focus, if the need is recognized by the administration, would be the upside, with the pragmatic Corker, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, continuing to be a valuable asset to the administration. That downside would be a freeze-out, making the last 14 months of Corker's term miserable.
The former Chattanooga mayor, perhaps because of Trump's business background, never seemed to be as sour on the New Yorker as a presidential candidate as many of his fellow Republicans. He undoubtedly saw some advantage in having a businessman, not just another politician, in the White House. Trump, he believed, was someone with whom he could work.
Indeed, Corker allowed himself to be courted as the candidate's vice presidential running mate and later as a prospective secretary of state.
So did he misjudge Trump?
No, we believe he was no different from many of his fellow Republicans in Congress and many who voted for him in believing he would stop being the elephant in the room when he was elected, then when he was inaugurated, then when he had to try to get a major initiative through Congress.
No one, least of all Corker, likes to suffer fools. So, on Sunday, he made a Trump-like response to the unwarranted snipes the president tweeted about him.
But the senator, we think, would work with him in a minute if he believed that shared goals he and the president had could be achieved.
Stewart Patrick, a foreign policy analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations, may have put it best in July when Corker praised a recent Trump foreign trip.
"My impression is that he's trying to be a good team player and hope for the best, but the president keeps going off even the most basic script and causing mini-diplomatic crises," he said. "Like any parent confronting an unruly toddler, he's using a mixture of encouragement and criticism."