Romney and the anti-Trump faction
GOP members opposed to president get stirred up by arrival of Mitt
Mitt Romney’s scathing critique of President Donald Trump has reignited a simmering feud between the two men, casting the incoming junior senator from Utah as the president’s highest-profile Republican foil and stoking talk of Trump’s vulnerability to a challenger for the party’s 2020 nomination.
Trump’s allies, including Romney’s niece, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, were quick on Wednesday to criticize Romney and seek to minimize him.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and others fanned out in media appearances and on Twitter in a show of force, knocking Romney as an awkward relic of the GOP past and reiterating their support for Trump.
Paul ridiculed Romney as someone “running around saying, ‘I’m holier than thou, look at me.’ ” Trump, meanwhile, was somewhat restrained, following counsel from his aides to shrug off Romney’s salvo.
“I wish Mitt could be more of a team player,” Trump told reporters at a Cabinet meeting.
But Romney’s friends and leading anti-Trump conservatives were glad to see him herald his arrival in Washington by writing a cutting op-ed piece in The Washington Post that said the president “has not risen to the mantle of the office.” The move was taken as a gesture of solidarity at a time of mounting anxiety among establishment Republicans.
“It gives permission for people to consider things and discuss things that were almost taboo before this, in terms of a challenger to Trump,” said William Kristol, a conservative commentator. “It’s a permission slip to have a real conversation about 2020.”
“It begins,” former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon wrote in an email to The Post, referring to what he sees as Romney allies’ efforts to block Trump from the 2020 Republican nomination.
Speaking Wednesday afternoon to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Romney said he is not planning to run in 2020 but is “going to see what the alternatives are.”
Many mainstream Republicans are increasingly alarmed by Trump’s behaviour and willing to battle with him in ways that would have seemed strained two years ago, when Trump had the party tightly in his grip after his stunning victory and its members largely fell into lockstep behind him.
Two years later, Trump’s presidency is under siege fol- lowing Republican losses in the 2018 elections.
An ongoing government shutdown, volatile financial markets, the special counsel probe, right-wing discontent over Trump’s failure to secure funding for a border wall, and empowered House Democrats all loom before the president, who has been isolated and lashing out at his critics.
Romney, as the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, a former Massachusetts governor and business executive with a powerful financial network, brings a new stature to the anti-Trump bloc of the party that has been missing as Republicans in Washington have operated in a bargaining fashion with Trump, enduring his slights and erratic actions to push through favoured policy items.
Romney says he will speak out “if I feel the need to.”
“For now at least Mitt Romney has become the leader of the Republican Resistance to Trump,” Kristol wrote.