When at their fag-end the Republican presidential primaries of 2012 degenerated to Mitt Romney versus Rick Santorum, who as near as I could tell was running for the United States presidential nomination of the Vatican, I suspended my judgment of Romney. I threw in with Mitt, accepted the assurance of Jim DeMint that he had "learned conservatism as a second language", never wrote peep against him, and on Election Night 2012 when he lost probably the winnable-est challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, I was devastated. But when I last affirmatively hated a human being, in 2011, the human being in question was Willard Mitt Romney. And half a decade later in 2016 that suspended judgment of mine was affirmed: I had it right the first time, I had the measure of the man; Mitt Romney is that vilest of creatures, the cynical politician with boundless ambition for nothing but his power and glory, who believes in nothing but his entitlement to power and glory, and who is perfectly prepared to say and do absolutely anything in the service of that power and glory.
Pardon the brutality of this honesty, brutality to Mormons and the Mormon state, but it must be said. Mormonism is ascriptural heresy and kookery, the indulgent invention of an early-19th Century madman who might conceivably be a distant cousin to me and who in some portraiture bears a resemblance, but I esteem Mormons as Americans and businessmen and genealogists and showmen, and I came by that esteem honestly, my father being an admirer of Mormon businessmen if not of their lunatic theology. And the brutal facts are these: Mitt Romney is a United States senator today for no reason other than that he's King of the Mormons, and among the 50 states is counted a Mormon state.
There was precisely one state of the 50 where Romney might expect not to be received with a hail of putrefied vegetables, so it was that state where Romney ran for Senate. Romney was born in Michigan and he worked and entered politics in Massachusetts, and so long as he had prospects other than Utah, he took 'em. But in 2018 Mitt Romney determined that he must be a United States senator, and he appreciated that if he appealed to the Mormon state for his Senate seat, as King of the Mormons, he could not be denied. In the event he nearly was denied -- Romney narrowly lost the first round of the nomination for U.S. Senate, in the party he had represented at the level of president not six years prior, and in the state which is his fiefdom -- but it's as one of Utah's finer representatives Jason Chaffetz observed on the news of Romney's Senate ambitions, "If Romney runs in Utah, he wins."
And so it was that the King of the Mormons was anointed United States senator from the Mormon state. And Mitt Romney's first effort as junior U.S. senator-elect from maybe the most Republican state in the Union, was not to offer a settlement to the crisis of the shuttered federal agencies and the unsecured southern border, but to submit an op-ed to the Democrat-activist Washington Post and to give a follow-on interview to the Democrat-activist CNN, damning his Republican president Donald Trump, principally on grounds of "character", whatever that may mean in this debased century and whatever it counts for in the existential struggle which is the politics of this age. Not to mention, this country oughtn't abide hectoring on "character" out of a cynical, self-seeking saboteur. I'll hope to be mistaken in this judgment but I find my judgment where Romney is concerned to be depressingly precise and prescient: Mitt Romney doesn't care a tinker's darn for the will and wishes of the people of Utah, or for the United States Senate or the legislation before it, or come to that for the Republic and the state of it; Romney is U.S. senator from Utah for no purpose other than that he has determined the office to be needful to his ambitions for president; and Romney's principle -- not "principles", plural, because he has just the one true principle -- is that Mitt Romney must be and shall be president of the United States, that greatest figure on God's earth.
It was only to be expected that Mitt Romney would be numbered among the Never Trumpers, those elements of the Republican elite who imagine that the enemy is not the America-hating leftism which means to tear it down and watch it burn and which today monopolizes the Democrat Party, but the force-of-nature conservative populist who means to save the Republic and build it up, namely Donald J. Trump. Romney is a cartoon of the Republican elite, and maybe the greatest living exponent of the your-father's-Oldsmobile, go-along-to-get-along Republican, those old hands who lead us to electoral defeat and who mark time in the way of policy when occasionally they do manage not to lose a vote of the people. The trouble with Romney's reaction to the Trump ascendancy was that his declaration of war on Trump in a set-piece speech, much promoted, came the day after Trump had effectively clinched the Republican nomination for president, in a primary campaign wherein Trump won more votes than any Republican for president since the advent of the presidential primary, and wherein more Americans voted on the Republican side than in any primaries since there's been such a thing. But it was so very much worse than even that.
Romney went well past the set-piece speechifying damning his successor as Republican nominee for president: he opened the Romney Rolodex of wealthy benefactors to the third-party, conservative-alternative spoiler candidate for president in Utah, at a time when the consensus was that any Trump triumph in the general election would be a close-run, that Trump couldn't hope to carry anything like the 306 electoral votes that fell to him on election night but might at best scrape over the finish-line with the modicum of 270, and that to yank out from under Trump a gimme-state for any Republican for president, by tipping just enough Republican votes to that conservative spoiler in Utah, would assure Trump's defeat and repudiation. That's to say, Romney quietly and practically sabotaged Trump's campaign in the general election with the purpose of handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton and thus placing himself for a second kick at the presidential can in 2020, as the I-told-you-so candidate. It was the news of that conspiracy that compelled me to conclude at last that I had it right the first time, that Mitt Romney was at least as despicable as my least charitable judgment of the man.
Now to the future, and if these prophesies of mine turn out to be mistaken then I'll duly enter the error in the accounting of my causes for humility. Mitt Romney plainly is delusional, as deluded as a Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton fantasizing of walking again triumphal into the Oval Office, but he's not a perfect fool, and I can only assume he appreciates that no man can win the presidency of the United States as a third-party nominee, not to say there's a statistically-significant contingent of Americans in any event clamoring for Mitt Romney at the top of some novel Romneyan Third Way ticket. Romney may be content to sponsor some loser also-ran candidate to siphon just enough Republican votes in a close contest to deny Trump the presidency, but Romney himself would never play the kamikaze, humiliated in a second presidential election and with three-point-something percent of the vote. And if "independents and moderates" wanted Mitt Romney for their president then surely he'd have been president since January 2013. And much as Democrats and the press adore Romney so long as he's damning Trump, he can't have forgotten already the savaging he took from those self-same individuals and institutions only half a decade past, once he had claimed the Republican nomination for president: any Democrat in America rejoicing today in Romney's every utterance, at the same time hates Romney's ever-living guts.
Obviously the estimation of Romney among Republicans and conservatives is that he's no conservative and no Republican, a liar and a loser, and very possibly the most self-seeking and traitorous figure in America today who's not a Democrat. So Mitt Romney is a man without a constituency; he'd be a man without a state but for the cult-with-a-state he happens to have been born into. But whatever his appreciation of those facts, I can only suppose that Romney imagines the facts to be passing: the great hope of Mitt Romney is the catastrophic collapse of Donald Trump, as in some impeachment proceeding, which in the Romney fantasy will alter the considerations unrecognizably, leaving Republicans to crawl chastened the the feet of the Mormon King, pleading "Wayward wretches were we, scorning your light, o Romney, for our Trumpian darkness! Pity us, o Romney; pity us and pardon us, and lead us to the power and the glory that is yours alone!"
That Mitt Romney means to run again for president is at this point past disputation, but the timing, the presidential cycle, is yet unknown even to Romney, dependent as it is on the demise one way or another of the Trump presidency, which I'm here to say will come only after eight years of American renaissance.
It's no more than is true and fair to pronounce Donald Trump vain and ambitious, like Mitt Romney is vain and ambitious, and there are the superficial parallels -- billionaire businessmen and Republican nominees for president, etc. -- but where Romney is a soulless calculator pristine of principles, Trump is a true-believer; where Romney will stop at nothing in the cause of Mitt Romney, Trump is an irresistible force of nature for the cause of saving the Republic and building it up; where Romney is driven, Trump is driven like no man on earth, easily the most energetic executive since Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago; and where America is the great love of Trump's life, the great love of Mitt Romney's life is Mitt Romney.
Pardon the brutality of this honesty, brutality to Mormons and the Mormon state, but it must be said. Mormonism is ascriptural heresy and kookery, the indulgent invention of an early-19th Century madman who might conceivably be a distant cousin to me and who in some portraiture bears a resemblance, but I esteem Mormons as Americans and businessmen and genealogists and showmen, and I came by that esteem honestly, my father being an admirer of Mormon businessmen if not of their lunatic theology. And the brutal facts are these: Mitt Romney is a United States senator today for no reason other than that he's King of the Mormons, and among the 50 states is counted a Mormon state.
There was precisely one state of the 50 where Romney might expect not to be received with a hail of putrefied vegetables, so it was that state where Romney ran for Senate. Romney was born in Michigan and he worked and entered politics in Massachusetts, and so long as he had prospects other than Utah, he took 'em. But in 2018 Mitt Romney determined that he must be a United States senator, and he appreciated that if he appealed to the Mormon state for his Senate seat, as King of the Mormons, he could not be denied. In the event he nearly was denied -- Romney narrowly lost the first round of the nomination for U.S. Senate, in the party he had represented at the level of president not six years prior, and in the state which is his fiefdom -- but it's as one of Utah's finer representatives Jason Chaffetz observed on the news of Romney's Senate ambitions, "If Romney runs in Utah, he wins."
And so it was that the King of the Mormons was anointed United States senator from the Mormon state. And Mitt Romney's first effort as junior U.S. senator-elect from maybe the most Republican state in the Union, was not to offer a settlement to the crisis of the shuttered federal agencies and the unsecured southern border, but to submit an op-ed to the Democrat-activist Washington Post and to give a follow-on interview to the Democrat-activist CNN, damning his Republican president Donald Trump, principally on grounds of "character", whatever that may mean in this debased century and whatever it counts for in the existential struggle which is the politics of this age. Not to mention, this country oughtn't abide hectoring on "character" out of a cynical, self-seeking saboteur. I'll hope to be mistaken in this judgment but I find my judgment where Romney is concerned to be depressingly precise and prescient: Mitt Romney doesn't care a tinker's darn for the will and wishes of the people of Utah, or for the United States Senate or the legislation before it, or come to that for the Republic and the state of it; Romney is U.S. senator from Utah for no purpose other than that he has determined the office to be needful to his ambitions for president; and Romney's principle -- not "principles", plural, because he has just the one true principle -- is that Mitt Romney must be and shall be president of the United States, that greatest figure on God's earth.
It was only to be expected that Mitt Romney would be numbered among the Never Trumpers, those elements of the Republican elite who imagine that the enemy is not the America-hating leftism which means to tear it down and watch it burn and which today monopolizes the Democrat Party, but the force-of-nature conservative populist who means to save the Republic and build it up, namely Donald J. Trump. Romney is a cartoon of the Republican elite, and maybe the greatest living exponent of the your-father's-Oldsmobile, go-along-to-get-along Republican, those old hands who lead us to electoral defeat and who mark time in the way of policy when occasionally they do manage not to lose a vote of the people. The trouble with Romney's reaction to the Trump ascendancy was that his declaration of war on Trump in a set-piece speech, much promoted, came the day after Trump had effectively clinched the Republican nomination for president, in a primary campaign wherein Trump won more votes than any Republican for president since the advent of the presidential primary, and wherein more Americans voted on the Republican side than in any primaries since there's been such a thing. But it was so very much worse than even that.
Romney went well past the set-piece speechifying damning his successor as Republican nominee for president: he opened the Romney Rolodex of wealthy benefactors to the third-party, conservative-alternative spoiler candidate for president in Utah, at a time when the consensus was that any Trump triumph in the general election would be a close-run, that Trump couldn't hope to carry anything like the 306 electoral votes that fell to him on election night but might at best scrape over the finish-line with the modicum of 270, and that to yank out from under Trump a gimme-state for any Republican for president, by tipping just enough Republican votes to that conservative spoiler in Utah, would assure Trump's defeat and repudiation. That's to say, Romney quietly and practically sabotaged Trump's campaign in the general election with the purpose of handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton and thus placing himself for a second kick at the presidential can in 2020, as the I-told-you-so candidate. It was the news of that conspiracy that compelled me to conclude at last that I had it right the first time, that Mitt Romney was at least as despicable as my least charitable judgment of the man.
Now to the future, and if these prophesies of mine turn out to be mistaken then I'll duly enter the error in the accounting of my causes for humility. Mitt Romney plainly is delusional, as deluded as a Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton fantasizing of walking again triumphal into the Oval Office, but he's not a perfect fool, and I can only assume he appreciates that no man can win the presidency of the United States as a third-party nominee, not to say there's a statistically-significant contingent of Americans in any event clamoring for Mitt Romney at the top of some novel Romneyan Third Way ticket. Romney may be content to sponsor some loser also-ran candidate to siphon just enough Republican votes in a close contest to deny Trump the presidency, but Romney himself would never play the kamikaze, humiliated in a second presidential election and with three-point-something percent of the vote. And if "independents and moderates" wanted Mitt Romney for their president then surely he'd have been president since January 2013. And much as Democrats and the press adore Romney so long as he's damning Trump, he can't have forgotten already the savaging he took from those self-same individuals and institutions only half a decade past, once he had claimed the Republican nomination for president: any Democrat in America rejoicing today in Romney's every utterance, at the same time hates Romney's ever-living guts.
Obviously the estimation of Romney among Republicans and conservatives is that he's no conservative and no Republican, a liar and a loser, and very possibly the most self-seeking and traitorous figure in America today who's not a Democrat. So Mitt Romney is a man without a constituency; he'd be a man without a state but for the cult-with-a-state he happens to have been born into. But whatever his appreciation of those facts, I can only suppose that Romney imagines the facts to be passing: the great hope of Mitt Romney is the catastrophic collapse of Donald Trump, as in some impeachment proceeding, which in the Romney fantasy will alter the considerations unrecognizably, leaving Republicans to crawl chastened the the feet of the Mormon King, pleading "Wayward wretches were we, scorning your light, o Romney, for our Trumpian darkness! Pity us, o Romney; pity us and pardon us, and lead us to the power and the glory that is yours alone!"
That Mitt Romney means to run again for president is at this point past disputation, but the timing, the presidential cycle, is yet unknown even to Romney, dependent as it is on the demise one way or another of the Trump presidency, which I'm here to say will come only after eight years of American renaissance.
It's no more than is true and fair to pronounce Donald Trump vain and ambitious, like Mitt Romney is vain and ambitious, and there are the superficial parallels -- billionaire businessmen and Republican nominees for president, etc. -- but where Romney is a soulless calculator pristine of principles, Trump is a true-believer; where Romney will stop at nothing in the cause of Mitt Romney, Trump is an irresistible force of nature for the cause of saving the Republic and building it up; where Romney is driven, Trump is driven like no man on earth, easily the most energetic executive since Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago; and where America is the great love of Trump's life, the great love of Mitt Romney's life is Mitt Romney.
