Romney stands out, but not surprisingly, in Trump’s rebuke

Senator Mitt Romney was visibly angry. Hours earlier on Wednesday, the Capitol had been breached by violent supporters of President Trump.

As he and his colleagues huddled in a safe part of the complex, Romney was irritated that the president and his facilitators in Congress were responsible for the attack on American democracy. At the end of the night, while senators confirmed President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, Romney delivered a scathing speech criticizing the elected officials who put political ambition ahead of the nation – the natural culmination of a danger that Romney had been warning of more four years.

“We met today due to the wounded pride of a selfish man and the indignation of his supporters whom he has deliberately misinformed in the past two months and acted on this morning,” said Romney, speaking in the Senate Chamber about Trump’s baseless allegations. November’s election was rigged.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him so angry,” said Katie Packer Beeson, deputy campaign manager for Romney’s presidential candidacy in 2012. “But I also thought I was never more proud to be identified as a ‘Romney person’.”

This Romney, with slightly disheveled hair, visibly furious, was different from the legal and sometimes tough candidate that Americans remember from the campaign in 2008 and 2012, a candidate who said “dope” or “dope” when he felt particularly in love. Just before he spoke, Romney was seated behind Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who was among the most prominent supporters of an effort to overturn the results of the November election. Dressed in a face mask with only his eyes visible, Romney appeared to be throwing daggers at the back of Hawley’s neck.

People close to him, as well as non-partisan political observers who have followed his career for two decades, say that Romney’s speech was the distillation of his life experiences, starting by watching his father, a former Michigan Republican Party governor, face your party’s anger over its support for civil rights.

“You have to go back to your father, George Romney, who defended justice in the 1960s. He learned lessons from that,” said David Kochel, a former senior adviser to Romney.

They also point to Romney’s Mormon faith.

After Romney was the only Republican to vote for Trump’s impeachment last year, he told a reporter that he drew on his experiences of growing up Mormon among those who did not share or understand his religion.

After regularly facing small tests of conscience, when a bigger challenge approaches, “you are not in a position where you don’t know how to defend something that is difficult,” he said, according to Atlantic.

Romney’s allies also point to his experience as a two-time presidential loser in the 2008 Republican Party primaries and then in the 2012 general elections.

“2012 was a very difficult campaign. He relented, and he did it gracefully. He came out of the spotlight and didn’t criticize [President] Obama in the meantime, ”said Lanhee Chen, Romney’s former policy advisor who now teaches at Stanford University. “All of these things are important lessons from the 2012 campaign.”

This is not to say that Romney was a perfectly consistent politician. As governor of Massachusetts, he was a centrist, but he swayed strongly to the right during the presidential primaries of 2008 and 2012, especially with regard to immigration.

During the last campaign, he actively sought endorsement from Trump, who was then still promoting Obama’s “birther” false theories. This culminated in a scary scene, where Trump supported Romney at his gold-crusted hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

“There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life. This is one of them, ”said Romney at the time.

The 73-year-old multimillionaire, who tried to hinder Trump’s nomination in 2016 because he believed it was dangerous for the Republican Party and the nation, is helped by the fact that he probably won’t run for president again, nor is he likely to face a strong challenge in the Senate primaries in Utah, a state where his family is popular and Republicans show special caution about Trump.

“He is at a different stage in his life and career,” said Chen. “But you see other people in relatively safe political situations who have not taken the measure of the risk he has taken.”

Romney faced repercussions; he was tricked by Trump when he spoke against him. He has been the target of anger by Trump supporters; on Tuesday, some of them confronted him at Salt Lake City airport and shouted, “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor! “On a flight to Washington.

Still, Brigham Young University political scientist Quin Monson said he did not expect Romney to lose remarkable support because of his speech on Wednesday.

“I don’t think Mitt Romney was harmed politically,” he said. “People who are really unhappy with Mitt Romney were already unhappy. They were already out to get him. “

But now perhaps less vocally, said Jason Perry, director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Policy Institute. “People who would normally stand up and say that Mitt Romney is not right – none of those voices are present,” Perry said on Thursday of the state’s political conversation. “Nobody was defending the actions of the people who invaded the Capitol yesterday.”

Throughout his career, Romney was defined by his seriousness, a trait widely ridiculed by the campaigns of his rivals GOP and on “Saturday Night Live”. That attribute could even explain his change of position, Monson said, as a meeting with Trump about a possible Cabinet nomination after the 2016 election, despite having criticized him fiercely.

“I think he was seriously trying to be useful, knowing he was dealing with the devil,” said Monson, whose company Y2 Analytics did research for Romney’s Senate campaign in 2018.

Romney was a quintessential post-war, pre-counterculture presence that did not seem to fit into the 21st century. He liked to sing an “America the Beautiful” stanza at rallies and was enlightened when describing the meeting with his “girlfriend” Ann when she was 15 years old.

Packer Beeson recalled the mockery that Romney received during his presidential campaigns as a man trapped in the 1950s and as a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ”type.

“Sometimes I look at him and think, ‘You came from a time when we were better than that,'” said Packer Beeson. “I think a lot of people don’t understand this character in ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ‘was not weak because he was not that strong and boastful man.

“The strength comes in different packaging and it doesn’t always look like what some people think it is today,” she said. “Certainly what we saw from Mitt Romney yesterday was strength.”

Some members of Romney’s inner circle say that instead of a watershed, Wednesday’s speech simply reflected the man they had known for a long time. And, they added, the fact that it looks extraordinary says more about current politics than it does about an elected official.

“What we saw with his speech … was not the product of a deep search for steel jaw consciousness and integrity, but the result of establishing fundamental principles in his life and living according to them,” said Matt Waldrip, the outgoing senator, chief of staff who worked with Romney most of his adult life. “If what Romney did last night was our measure of integrity, we need to raise the bar.”