Mitt Romney Doesn’t Give a Trump

Photo by Office of Senator Mitt Romney, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mitt Romney’s life was in danger on January 6. He learned this with the rest of us during the Senate impeachment hearings on February 10, with new video showing Officer Eugene Goodman turning him around in the hall while insurrectionists were just one floor below and only seconds away.

Romney had already put his political life on the line to defy Trump, but to know that his mortal life was at risk crystalizes just how risky and — here I use a word that’s rarely used of politicians — courageous his actions have been.

The path of the former Bain Capital titan to this day is surprising. In a handful of years, he went from wining and dining Donald Trump in hopes of a Secretary of State nomination, a role to which he would have brought more gravitas than the succession of figures that served in the role these last four years, to making history as the first member of a president’s party to vote for impeachment.

His policy leadership in health insurance as governor of Massachusetts set the stage for Obama’s passage of the Affordable Care Act, which, while far from perfect, strengthened the safety net against catastrophic medical costs and expanded insurance coverage to more than twenty million Americans. And now, toward the twilight of his political career, he has stepped once more into the breach of policy debates with a proposal for child benefits that has earned praise from the likes of Matt Bruenig on the left, to the Niskanen Center, Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnuru on the right. If it passes, the Romney plan will join the Affordable Care Act as the most important policy transformations of the past twenty years, both of them bearing Romney’s fingerprints. For all the talk of populism from the likes of Josh Hawley, this is the most serious populist proposal to come from the GOP in years — proof, perhaps, that Romney has learned since his failed presidential bid in 2012 how to craft a more broadly appealing conservative agenda.

He hasn’t gotten this far without drawing fire from critics, especially to his right, who are eager to dismiss him as a RINO. His child benefit plan has already been attacked by Senator Rubio, for whom “welfare” is not a word for polite company. The more Republicans praise the nuclear family, it seems, the less likely they are to notice how fragile it is and how it can be meaningfully supported with concrete policy reform; they would rather take potshots at the BLM movement for its critique of the sole focus on the nuclear family, though even conservatives like David Brooks have made the same point recently. And staunch pro-life Republicans like Rubio should be leaping at the chance to defend a bill like Romney’s that begins benefits even while the child is in utero, but on this point they remain studiously silent.

As much as Trump has dominated the news cycle since that ill-fated escalator ride to kick off his campaign, it may in the end be his foil Mitt Romney who gets the last laugh by defining this era’s policy landscape — not by scandals or tweet storms, but by the narrower path of patient, principled governance.

It’s hard to overstate the irony of Romney’s ascent coinciding with Trump’s descent into cruelty, high crimes and misdemeanors. The more Trump-loyalist Republicans attack Romney and the few others like him in Congress that stand for principle over cult of personality, the firmer his convictions become. Trump’s jumping on one end of the see-saw has only served to fling Romney into a new height of influence. How has the Senator from Utah resisted the pressure to go along to get along? By governing for his legacy, not for accolades on Fox News.

The tension between the small but staunch Romney wing of the party and the Trump wing — the latter including the likes of QAnon advocate Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments by House Democrats after Republicans failed to keep modern day Birchers out of their ranks — has pushed the GOP close to a breaking point. State and county branches of the party have gone on a censure spree targeting new members of the anti-Trump resistance like Liz Cheney and old guard Never Trumpers like Ben Sasse, raising the question of how sincere their objections to so-called cancel culture truly are.

Will Romney leave the Republican Party? Or more accurately, will he finally quit the party that has left him behind to chase the fever dream of conspiracy theories and private jet populism? A party that could not even muster a few bullet points worth of policy ideas to build a platform in 2020, instead issuing a loyalty oath to the now twice-impeached former president? If Romney does blink first, his break-up line should be simply, “It’s not me, it’s you.” America barely deserves Mitt, and the Republicans certainly do not.

When the history of these difficult few months for our democracy is written, there will be no shortage of villains. But we must never forget those who stood their ground when everything was at stake. Senator Mitt Romney and Officer Eugene Goodman belong at the top of that list.

I struggled with how to talk to my kids about the attack on the Capitol. I was still a child myself, just starting high school, when our nation was attacked on September 11, and now I have to explain another tragic day to my own children. As time passes and the profiles in courage of these few heroes are written, the burden of telling the story will be made just a little lighter by their example.

After learning that Officer Goodman saved him from a close call, Mitt Romney said, “I look forward to thanking him.” We should second that and extend our gratitude to the Senator as well; hopefully, more will join him in charting a moderate course for conservatives beyond the Trump era.