Romney accused of treachery in attack on Trump

‘I won big, and he didn’t,’ U.S. president replies

WASHINGTON • Senatorelect Mitt Romney’s biting critique that U.S. President Donald Trump “has not risen to the mantle of the office” touched off a series of counterattacks from Trump’s allies Wednesday and an initial effort to insulate him from a primary challenge next year, an illustration of the loyalty Trump still commands even as he enters a perilous stretch of his presidency.

Trump himself wasted little time in rebuking Romney for an opinion piece in The Washington Post, pointedly noting that the former Massachusetts governor lost his 2012 presidential bid. “I won big, and he didn’t,” the president tweeted Wednesday morning. “He should be happy for all Republicans. Be a TEAM player & WIN!”

But Trump’s loyalists responded even more ferociously, and out in front was Ronna Mcdaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is also Romney’s niece. She often went by her maiden name, Romney, until Trump suggested she change it.

“For an incoming Republican freshman senator to attack @realdonaldtrump as their first act feeds into what the Democrats and media want and is disappointing and unproductive,” Mcdaniel wrote about her uncle on Twitter.

Sensing the makings of a primary threat to the president, some of his most ardent backers on the RNC began making the case that the party’s rules be changed to ensure Trump’s renomination in 2020.

Calling Romney’s attack “calculated political treachery,” Jevon Williams, national committeeman from the Virgin Islands, wrote in an email to other members of the Republican National Committee that the party should move to protect Trump by amending party rules to make it harder for a challenger to have his named place in nomination at the GOP’S 2020 convention.

And, Williams wrote, the party should use its winter meeting this month to pass a resolution endorsing Trump and declaring him “the presumptive nominee in 2020.”

And other Republicans saw Romney’s offensive as an opening to nurture their ties with Trump, who keeps close tabs on who defends him in the media. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has been aggressively lobbying the president to side with his noninterventionist approach to foreign policy, scheduled an afternoon conference call with reporters to go after his soon-to-be colleague.

Trump’s senior aides were less exercised about Romney’s attack, with one of them noting with pleasure that the president was relatively restrained in his tweet about Romney — and that an overreaction would only reinforce Romney’s criticism.

Trump has been warily eyeing the arrival of Romney since well before The Post published the piece online Tuesday night.

Last fall, Trump, mindful that Romney would move quickly to assert himself, asked Sen. Mitch Mcconnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, not to give Romney a leadership platform. A Republican familiar with the discussion said Trump specifically wanted to keep Romney away from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm in Senate races.

But even if Romney gets no formal title with Senate Republicans, Trump aides worry that Romney’s extensive fundraising network will make it hard for the GOP campaign committee to resist making use of him in the 2020 Senate election cycle.

The notion of installing Romney at the campaign committee was a pet project of his longtime family friend and adviser, Spencer Zwick, who raised the idea with donors as a way of carving out a leadership role as an unusually prominent freshman lawmaker.

The idea drew at least mild interest from Romney’s wife, Ann, but Romney was less intrigued and viewed it as a non-starter for practical reasons, two people briefed on the conversations said. The position is effectively a fundraising assignment, and another senator, Todd Young of Indiana, got the job. Young told Republican officials last month that there had been conversations about getting Romney involved with the campaign committee, according to a GOP strategist familiar with the conversations.

But operating in a formal capacity as a partisan functionary would likely have required Romney to stay silent about his disagreements with Trump, lest he put Republican candidates in the position of having to pick sides between the two men.