Jon Tester was on his farm in rural Montana when his phone rang with the news: It was his chief of staff, informing him that the president of the United States had just called for his resignation on Twitter.
The Montana Democrat briefly considered President Donald Trump’s latest attack on him, then fired up his tractor and went on his way. Tester wasn’t going to get into it with Trump over the senator’s role in bringing down the president’s Veterans Affairs nominee, Ronny Jackson.
“It’s spring planting on the farm. Would I have liked to have been out pushing back on some of this? Sure. But I couldn’t, I was farming,” Tester said in an interview. “Truthfully.”