Mitt Romney

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. As Donald Trump strides toward his fourth year in the White House, his enemies have yet to answer the most basic questions of 2016. Why is Trump president? Why not a nice Republican like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush? Two maps tell the tale. The first is the obvious one, the map of states whose electoral votes Trump won, a map that includes states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that no other Republican presidential aspirant had won since the 1980s. But the second map is even more important — it shows not why Trump won but why the Republican party was doomed to lose without Trump and Trumpism. It’s the map of George W.

‘Eight years ago, I argued that Russia was our number one geopolitical adversary,’ Mitt Romney said this week in his maiden Senate speech. And who could forget Barack Obama’s burn in the televised presidential debate of 2011? ‘The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,’ Obama said. Four years later, with the US and Russia at loggerheads and Russian ‘collusion’ a theme of the 2016 election, Romney was vindicated. But it was Obama who was the outgoing president.

Good news for Team NeverTrump: they have their man — a declared 2020 primary challenger to Donald Trump, and it’s exactly the man they wanted, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, a man who has graced a presidential ticket before, Mitt… Sorry, Willard… No, wait… Will... William. As in William Weld. The other former Republican governor of Massachusetts who once had a spot on a national ticket, as the Libertarian party’s 2016 nominee for vice president. Romney has carpet-bagged his way to the US Senate, after all, a perch from which he can write Washington Post op-eds to show how woke he’s become.

The normally sober Associated Press is reporting the Senate’s vote to overturn Trump’s declaration of emergency in the southern border as ‘a stunning rebuke’ and ‘a remarkable break between Trump and Senate Republicans.’ But it isn’t. The 12 Senate Republicans who joined forces with every Democrat in the vote to annul Trump’s declaration did so for predictable ideological reasons. Libertarian-leaning Republicans such as Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey voted to overturn the emergency on ‘constitutionalist’ grounds, seeing the National Emergencies Act of 1976 as constitutionally dubious or worse and rejecting the mechanism by which it allows the president to appropriate funds.

A couple of days ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute announced that Donald Trump, pursuing a central campaign promise to cut federal regulations and ‘drain the swamp,’ had during his first two years in office issued the fewest new rules ‘in recorded history.’ In other news, Mitt Romney, the failed presidential candidate and incoming junior senator from Utah, published a stinging rebuke of the President in the Washington Post. ‘[H]is conduct over the past two years,’ Romney wrote, ‘particularly his actions last month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.

One of President Donald Trump’s chief political foils in the Republican Party — a party that increasingly resembles a Trump fan club more than a group of partisan but independent thinkers — is about to storm the national scene and send a jolt of energy to the dwindling and listless #NeverTrump movement. Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, 2012 Republican presidential nominee, and wealthy businessman, is reportedly preparing to announce his formal campaign to be the next US Senator from Utah.  And with no serious Republican in the heavily-Mormon state willing to throw a hat in the ring to challenge Romney, it is a virtual assurance that he will win the election.