OK, about this, by Romney. There are Republicans who believe deeply in rewarding their Party’s largest donors by cutting their taxes. They are all for packing the courts with judicial legislators able to impose conservative policy preferences by fiat. washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-…
2. They are willing to support Trump when he does things they never supported before, like starting trade wars with no plan to end them — Trump is just “cracking down,” “getting tough,” etc. But they don’t like his tweeting, and his language makes them uncomfortable.
3. This is the Republican alternative to Trump. This is @MittRomney. Let’s be fair here: Romney doesn’t list corruption among the things about Trump he supports. He doesn’t say he approves of Trump getting campaign help from the Russian government.
4. Romney never says he is for US Persian Gulf policy being influenced by Gulf Arabs’ financial investment in Trump, or gives a big thumbs-up to Trump’s bratty daughter & her slumlord husband running their private businesses while holding policy positions in the White House.
5. Romney doesn’t say much of anything about any of this. He presents himself as an alternative to Trump, not an opposition. He aims to reassure conservatives in the Fox News bubble that he’s as much against the liberals and the non-Fox media as they are.
6. Romney’s is a kind of tightrope walk. But the tightrope isn’t there, not in the country (though maybe in Utah). Trump’s character is among the things Republican conservatives like most about him, and even those who don’t feel that way dislike it less than they do liberals.
7. There’s something else @MittRomney barely mentions in his @washingtonpost piece: the Senate. Oversight of the Executive Branch is one of the most important things Congress does; Senators have the unique power to confirm Presidential appointments as well.
8. Under Mitch McConnell — as every Republican Senator now serving most assuredly is — the Senate does not do oversight. Senate Republicans will do nothing to upset Trump. They hold no hearings, and confirm what nominees Trump sends them, even skeezy ones like Brett Kavanaugh.
9. @MittRomney might try to change that. He can still make a speech whenever Trump insults some retired general if he wants. But it’s the institution of the Senate that can provide a meaningful check on Trump, not Mitt Romney’s stern visage and soaring, optimistic rhetoric.
10. Six years ago, Mitt Romney tried to campaign for President as if the George W Bush administration had never happened — as if an Iraq invasion had not become a bloody quagmire, as if regulatory blank checks to Romney’s friends in the financial services industry...
11... had not produced the most devastating recession in 80 years. He failed. He’ll fail again if he merely takes the place of occasional, ineffectual Trump critics like Jeff Flake & Bob Corker, who voted for everything Trump wanted but sometimes said unkind things to reporters
12. I don’t believe there is a Republican Party worth saving. That’s why I left. If Romney wants to prove people like me wrong, he’ll have to forget about the tightrope act. To change the GOP, he has to be willing to tear it apart. [end]
.@threadreaderapp Please unroll.
