Mitt Romney has made a bit of a name for himself in recent weeks as a prominent republican voice against President Donald Trump, making him one of the few GOP members willing to push back on the current administration.
This ins’t a terrible surprise, however, as the Utah Senator has long been a vocal critic of the President, working to disparage Trump on Twitter and beyond.
His latest foray in the “resistance” comes as the Democrats have amplified their own calls to impeach and remove President Trump from office on the heels of a number of national polls indicating the nation’s shift in sentiment.
According to a bit of Gonzo-esque reporting from The Atlantic:
Trump has responded with a wrathful procession of personal attacks—deriding Romney as a “pompous ass,” taunting him over his failed presidential bid in 2012, and tweeting a cartoonish video that tags the senator as a “Democrat secret asset.”
These confrontations have turned Romney into one of the most closely watched figures in the impeachment battle now consuming Washington. While his fellow Republicans rail against “partisan witch hunts” and “fake whistle-blowers,” Romney is taking the prospect of a Senate trial seriously—he’s reviewing The Federalist Papers, brushing up on parliamentary procedure, and staying open to the idea that the president may need to be evicted from the Oval Office.
In the nine years I’ve been covering Romney, I’ve never seen him quite so liberated. Unconstrained by consultants, unconcerned about reelection, he is thinking about things such as legacy, and inheritance, and the grand sweep of history. Here, in the twilight of his career, he seems to sense—in a way that eludes many of his colleagues—that he’ll be remembered for what he does in this combustible moment. “I do think people will view this as an inflection point in American history,” Romney tells me.
The President’s July 25th phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart has been part and parcel to the left’s sudden willingness to call their anti-Trump efforts a “formal impeachment inquiry”, as if that somehow legitimizes their now three-year effort to nullify the results of the 2016 election.
