Romney Bomb: ‘A Very Large Portion Of My Party Really Doesn’t Believe In the Constitution’ and That’s Not All

A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

Romney is purportedly retiring because none of the men in his family have lived beyond 88, which would give him another 12 years if he follows in their footsteps. That is one reason he’s retiring but there are others. Romney is as worried about democracy as we are — which makes me wonder why he doesn’t stay and fight for it? That said, if I thought I was going to die in 12 years, I might be parsing out my time differently as well.

His time in the Senate had left Romney worried—not just about the decomposition of his own political party, but about the fate of the American project itself.

Shortly after moving into his Senate office, Romney had hung a large rectangular map on the wall. First printed in 1931 by Rand McNally, the “histomap” attempted to chart the rise and fall of the world’s most powerful civilizations through 4,000 years of human history. When Romney first acquired the map, he saw it as a curiosity. After January 6, he became obsessed with it. He showed the map to visitors, brought it up in conversations and speeches. More than once, he found himself staring at it alone in his office at night. The Egyptian empire had reigned for some 900 years before it was overtaken by the Assyrians. Then the Persians, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Turks—each civilization had its turn, and eventu­ally collapsed in on itself. Maybe the falls were inevitable. But what struck Romney most about the map was how thoroughly it was dominated by tyrants of some kind—pharaohs, emperors, kaisers, kings. “A man gets some people around him and begins to oppress and dominate others,” he said the first time he showed me the map. “It’s a testosterone-related phenomenon, perhaps. I don’t know. But in the history of the world, that’s what happens.” America’s experiment in self-rule “is fighting against human nature.”

The idea that a nothing, an imitation of a human being like Donald Trump could upset an apple cart built by minds such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and the others is a horrifying thought but we need only look at the fact that 73 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and Romney’s qualms are not the least bit far fetched.

But I don’t know if I agree with his conclusion that America’s experiment is “fighting against human nature.” Defying historical precedent yes. But the magic of the American democratic experiment has always been that it is a system predicated on the rule of the best in mankind’s collective character, the “better angels of our nature” as Abraham Lincoln put it. I still believe in the dream, while not ignoring the message of history.

“This is a very fragile thing,” he told me. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”

Yes, it is. And the Republican party is only too happy to put the gargoyle in a limo and drive it to Pennsylvania Avenue. And this is while knowing full well who and what Trump is. Romney goes on to bear witness to this.

Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler­like psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”

This dissonance soon wore on Romney’s patience. Every time he publicly criticized Trump, it seemed, some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity. “I sure wish I could do what you do,” they’d say, or “Gosh, I wish I had the constituency you have,” and then they’d look at him expectantly, as if waiting for Romney to convey profound gratitude. This happened so often that he started keeping a tally; at one point, he told his staff that he’d had more than a dozen similar exchanges. He developed a go-to response for such occasions: “There are worse things than losing an election. Take it from somebody who knows.”

One afternoon in March 2019, Trump paid a visit to the Senate Republicans’ weekly caucus lunch. He was in a buoyant mood—two days earlier, the Justice Department had announced that the much-anticipated report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. As Romney later wrote in his journal, the president was met with a standing ovation fit for a conquering hero, and then launched into some rambling remarks. He talked about the so-called Russia hoax and relitigated the recent midterm elections and swung wildly from one tangent to another. He declared, somewhat implausibly, that the GOP would soon become “the party of health care.” The senators were respectful and attentive.

As soon as Trump left, Romney recalled, the Republican caucus burst into laughter.

JFC. That says it all. The hypocrisy is so thick and pervasive that if you could carve it into stones you could build another national cathedral with it.

The article goes on to describe the first impeachment proceeding. This is a lengthy but worthwhile read. Here’s another interesting snip.

On December 11, 2019, McConnell summoned Romney to his office and pitched him on joining forces. He explained that several vulnerable members of their caucus were up for re­election, and that a prolonged, polarizing Senate trial would force them to take tough votes that risked alienating their constituents. Mc­Connell wanted Romney to vote to end the trial as soon as the opening arguments were completed. McConnell didn’t bother defending Trump’s actions. Instead, he argued that protecting the GOP’s Senate majority was a matter of vital national importance. He predicted that Trump would lose reelection, and painted an apocalyptic picture of what would happen if Democrats took control of Congress: They’d turn Puerto Rico and D.C. into states, engineering a permanent Senate majority; they’d ram through left-wing legislation such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Romney said he couldn’t make any promises about his vote. (McConnell declined to comment on this conversation.)

And yes, it gets much worse. This is both sobering and sad. McConnell agreed that the impeachment case against Trump was compelling but he refused to do the right thing — as did the GOP caucus.

During a break in the proceedings, after the impeachment managers finished their presentation, Romney walked by McConnell. “They nailed him,” the Senate majority leader said.

Romney, taken aback by McConnell’s candor, responded carefully: “Well, the defense will say that Trump was just investigating corruption by the Bidens.”

“If you believe that,” McConnell replied, “I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.” (McConnell said he does not recall this conversation and it does not match his thinking at the time.)

If it’s a liar’s contest between Romney and McConnell, I’m going to believe Romney, simply because of the action he took to remove Trump. A person is defined by his or her actions. And this piece goes on to describe how Paul Ryan tried to talk Romney out of his vote to remove Trump. That’s the Paul Ryan we all know: a gutless sycophant to his dying breath.

Ryan told him that voting to convict Trump would make Romney an outcast in the party, that many of the people who’d tried to get him elected president would never speak to him again, and that he’d struggle to pass any meaningful legislation. Ryan said that he respected Romney, and wanted to make absolutely sure he’d thought through the repercussions of his vote. Romney assured him that he had, and said goodbye.

In all fairness, there are multiple considerations to every vote. That’s political reality. Sometimes there are moral considerations, as is overwhelmingly the case here. There are always tactical considerations. But the point to be made here, is that the immensity of the threat that Trump has always posed to our country and our way of life should have overridden any other consideration. America comes first. Democracy comes first. And whether you’re popular or a bit hamstrung in passing a bill is a matter which pales besides these other considerations. But today’s GOP can’t seem to grasp that. This is why we’re in the position we’re in. We didn’t get here overnight. The Republican party has been in a state of steady decline for four decades now. If it wasn’t a rotting, cancerous body, it would not have shat out Donald Trump as its candidate in 2016.

As the now famous Trump meme states: “It’s almost impossible to believe he exists. It’s as if we took everything that was bad about America, scraped it up off the floor, wrapped it all up in an old hot dog skin, and then taught it to make noises with its face.” The Republicans all know this. Yet, in their folly of keeping themselves in power and relevant, they will defend him to the end. And that end may be near. Surely the end of the Grand Old Party as we know it has arrived, but whether they take America down the tubes with them has yet to be seen.