“It was an honor to have been considered for Secretary of State of our great country. My discussions with President-elect Trump have been both enjoyable and enlightening. I have very high hopes that the new administration will lead the nation to greater strength, prosperity and peace.”
Mitt Romney announcing the end of his campaign to be Secretary of State
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I have never had much truck for Mitt Romney. He always struck me as a stiff suit filed more with ambition than anything really important. Then a few months ago I took a second look at the chiseled millionaire and thought – briefly – that I had been wrong to write him off as an opportunistic lightweight. Turns out I was right the first time.
Romney’s essentially opportunistic nature led him to a run for the Senate in Massachusetts years ago against Ted Kennedy. Romney’s basic strategy was to shape his positions in order to get to the left of the man who was his generation’s paragon of liberalism. He failed. Kennedy humbled him.
Humbled…again
Undeterred Romney returned to capture the governorship of his adopted state and then governed as a genuine Northeastern moderate. What the hell, the guy was a Republican liberal back when we had such an endangered creature.
He wasn’t anti-environment, he supported Roe v. Wade and the health care plan Romney championed was essentially a state-level version of the Republican-hated Obamacare. But when the “savior of the Salt Lake City Olympics” ran for the White House he had to reverse course and move sharply to the right. He discovered the pro-life movement and had to spend most of his campaign explaining why his state level Affordable Care Act really wasn’t nearly identical to the ideas his opponent, Barack Obama, championed. Obama humbled him.
Romney might have run again this year, but probably knew that his time had come and gone. Nevertheless Romney emerged briefly – and facetiously it turns out – as a serious person, once again a political player. When he called come lately Republican Donald Trump exactly what he is, a dangerous man, Romney was back in the game. It turns out that was an act, too. Romney’s last act.
The man who will soon be president could not abide the Romney criticism and, of course, he struck back. Mitt had “choked like a dog,” Donald J. Trump said, and he was “stiff.” Well, I agree with Trump about that much.
Using his favorite attack tool – Twitter – Trump left no insult behind. “Mitt Romney, who totally blew an election that should have been won and whose tax returns made him look like a fool, is now playing tough guy.” That was after Romney called Trump a “fraud” and a “phony” unfit for the presidency and back when I was doing my own reassessment of Romney. I should have saved the energy.
“When Mitt Romney asked me for my endorsement last time around,” Trump Tweeted, “he was so awkward and goofy that we all should have known he could not win!”
With his forceful indictment of Trump earlier this year it seemed for a brief time that Mitt Romney was finally caving to principle. But for Mitt flirting with principle was both short term and an aberration. Romney, as so many others have, soon came to grovel before the most unqualified, ignorant and dangerous man to win the White House since, well, maybe since ever.
Romney said in June that he found Trump “so troubling, and I know a lot of folks are saying, ‘Mitt just get off your high horse on this and get behind the guy.’ But these things are personal. I love this country. I love the founders. I love what this country is built upon and its values and seeing this is breaking my heart.”
Romney was visibly emotional and appeared to tear up when making the remarks. But all that emotion soon enough gave way to enabling – Trump enabling.
A few days ago Romney tucked his political tail between his legs and slinked into Trump Tower to be interviewed to be The Great Man’s Secretary of State. The cringe worthy photo of the two men at dinner with Reince Priebus should be widely re-produced and mailed to every politician who cavalierly sells out principle in the name of ambition. That photo will be in the dictionary next to the definition of “humiliation.”
Frog legs and crow. Did it taste like ashes?
Romney later posted on his Facebook page that it had been a great honor to be considered for the top job in the Trump Cabinet, but of course it was all a sham and likely everyone knew it but Mitt. Trump was slapping Romney around in public said Roger Stone, a man almost as reprehensible as Trump, in order to “torture” him for daring to speak ill of the Authoritarian-in-Chief.
What a spectacle. Mitt participating in his own public humiliation. Sad. Shows what craven ambition can do to a person.
Mitt Romney, the guy who has always placed his aspiration above all else, might have ended his public life as one of the genuine truth tellers about Donald Trump. He might have been remembered as a person of principle with the guts to call out a charlatan. Instead he allowed the petty, little, mean guy who will become president play him like a fiddle. Trump humiliated him. It has become a pattern for Romney.
Once you surrender principle and put your character in hock to pursue a personal desires, particularly in the face of great evidence and despite your own words, there is no going back. When – not if – Donald Trump gives Mitt Romney cause again to speak truth about our new president Romney will be silent. He will have no choice. He caved when character counted and got nothing to show beyond a very public lesson in dishonor. Anything he might ever say about the future of his party and the presidency will now be seen through the filter of the pained expression on Mitt’s face while Trump shamed him – publicly and repeatedly.
Mitt Romney had his moment and spent it on a dinner of frog legs with Donald Trump at a Michelin three star restaurant in Trump Tower. Romney went to that dinner to eat crow and surrender his pride. Then he said all that Trump demanded of him. Then he posted on Facebook what a great honor it had been – to be humiliated by a man he knows is unfit.
You almost wonder if Trump also stuck him with the dinner check.