Opinion | Mitt Romney’s Tragic Ambivalence

When Romney gave a speech at the Utah Republican Party’s convention in 2021, he was prepared for boos, but emerged shaken by the sheer intensity of the red-faced fury that confronted him. He was, writes Coppins, afraid of his own constituents. “There are deranged people among us,” he said, and in Utah, “people carry guns.” After Jan. 6, Coppins writes, Romney spent $5,000 a day on security for his family.

But Romney isn’t using the announcement of his coming retirement to warn the country against the danger of a right-wing movement that routinely resorts to threats of violence. He certainly isn’t defecting from the Republican Party for the remainder of his time in the Senate. Instead, by putting age at the center of his argument, he’s setting himself above the fray, pretending that both parties are equally at fault in bringing the country to this perilous pass. Romney has shown far more decency and courage in response to Trump than almost all his colleagues, but in this case, he’s still pulling his punches.

There’s something Hamlet-like in Romney’s temporizing. He wants to defend the party of his revered father, the liberal Republican George Romney, but he’s often been hesitant about striking at the venal interloper who’s taken it over. During the 2016 campaign, Romney gave a speech warning of the “trickle-down racism” a Trump presidency would bring, an echo of George Romney’s refusal in 1964 to endorse Barry Goldwater, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act. Yet, as ABC News reported, even though Romney didn’t support Trump himself, he “said that he wouldn’t be spending the next six months trying to convince anyone not to vote for Trump.”

It’s possible that Republican leaders, had they acted quickly and decisively in 2016, could have thwarted Trump before he’d consolidated his messianic hold over the party’s base. But Romney, like other establishment Republicans, underestimated the autocratic threat posed by Trump, or overestimated his party’s patriotic fortitude. It’s a mistake he would make again.

After Trump was elected, Romney evidently thought he could save the Republican Party from the inside, abasing himself in a bid to become Trump’s secretary of state. Entering the Senate, he tried to chart a path for a post-Trump conservatism while ignoring Trump himself as much as possible. While promising to speak out about Trump’s worst excesses, he wrote in The Washington Post, “I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault.” (For that, he had the pseudonymous Twitter account Pierre Delecto, where he could applaud squibs about Trump’s moral depravity and evident unfitness.)