At 1:38 p.m. on Wednesday, Sen. Mitt Romney officially declared his political career dead. Despite multiple attempts to resuscitate it in 2012 and 2018, Romney’s tenure as a pompous D.C. partisan is done.
The Utah Republican clearly desires to leave a political legacy that is hailed by the corporate media and the Washington uniparty. In his retirement announcement, Romney hinged the success of his first and only Senate term on the “particularly productive” performance he’s made in passing several key pieces of President Joe Biden’s legislative wish list.
But exacerbating record-high inflation and trampling on Americans’ Second Amendment rights aren’t the only things the senator’s career will be remembered for.
The contempt Romney holds for Republican voters, his congressional GOP colleagues, and former President Donald Trump leaves a stain on his career that conservatives won’t easily forget.
A Tainted Track Record
Despite spending the last two decades deeply rooted in politics, the candidate who had to move states to get elected only pulled off one gubernatorial term in Massachusetts — where he laid the groundwork for the destructive health-care policy we know as Obamacare and helped undermine Catholic hospitals in his state that opposed abortion — and one senatorial victory in Utah.
The rest of his campaigning career is overshadowed by his two failed presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, his loss in the 1994 race to unseat Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, and his embarrassing attempt to become Trump’s secretary of state.
When he finally did get elected (to the Senate instead of the White House), Romney supported forever wars, adopted leftist rhetoric on Jan. 6 and election integrity, supported Biden’s pro-abortion pick for the FDA, and voted with establishment Republicans and Democrats to jeopardize Americans’ constitutional rights like the right to free speech.
During the 2020 summer of rage, which led to billions of dollars of destruction and dozens of deaths, Romney offered a full endorsement of the problematic Black Lives Matter movement with photos of himself joining a racially charged march.
Despite posting a viral masked photo of himself in a large crowd in 2020, Romney hypocritically supported the authoritarian Covid regime, and even doubled down on his support for pandemic panic in 2022 by voting to keep masking toddlers.
Romney may have opposed Ketanji Brown Jackson’s appointment to the D.C. circuit court in 2021 but that vote was overshadowed one year later when the “principled conservative” voted to confirm Biden’s affirmative action pick to the Supreme Court. At the time, Romney called the judge, who faced criticism for her leniency on child sex criminals and inability to define what a “woman” is, “a well-qualified jurist and a person of honor.”
He also worked overtime against voters’ wishes in 2022 to fundraise for Liz Cheney, a renowned Republican in name only, and even appeared to support her collaboration with Democrats to weaponize the Jan. 6 committee against her own party.
Haters Gonna Hate
More damning than Romney’s extremely anti-conservative policy track record, however, is his treatment of the people who escorted him into office.
After breezing through the Senate election in 2019, with help from Trump’s repeated yet unwanted endorsement, Romney penned an opinion editorial for The Washington Post signaling his distaste for the Republican leader before the new lawmakers had even been sworn in.
Romney didn’t just talk the anti-Trump talk. He walked the anti-Trump walk by routinely criticizing the president and the people who voted for him. It wasn’t long before Romney solidified his place as an establishment Republican who was more than willing to cross his conservative voters if it meant undermining their preferred presidential candidate.
Exhibit A was when he became the only GOP senator to support both of the Democrats’ sham impeachment campaigns. That decision was one of many that prompted the propaganda press to pivot from shaming Romney as “awkward” to calling him “courageous.”
Romney doesn’t only hate Trump. The bad blood extends to his conservative colleagues in the Senate too.
In 2022, Romney tried to help oust his Utah colleague Sen. Mike Lee by refusing to endorse Lee over his “independent” challenger Evan McMullin. More recently, the senator confessed that he holds a special disdain in his heart for Republican Sens. J.D. Vance, Ron Johnson, and Josh Hawley for being too Trumpy and too curious about Biden family corruption.
“A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” Romney told his biographer McKay Coppins.
Romney also hates his voters. He said as much in his 2022 screed in The Atlantic which complained about Republican voters’ views on climate change and Jan. 6, 2021. Despite facing several censures and boos from his constituents, Romney repeatedly “punished” the Republicans who voted for him by contradicting their wishes.
R.I.P. to Romney’s political career. It won’t be missed much except by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is sad to see one of his blank-check-to-Ukraine buddies go.
