Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Mittens Is Back! (But Where's Rafalca?)

Update #2: Jonathan Swan, at Axios, provides the backstory on why Trump endorsed Romney:

I've been calling people in the White House and sources close to Mitt Romney to find out the backstory behind the Trump endorsement of Romney.

What I've learned: Both sides agree Romney, who has a tumultuous history with Trump, didn't ask for an endorsement. A senior administration official told me the endorsement "is something the President wanted to do.  He proactively reached out and Mitt Romney happily accepted.”

A source close to Romney told me: 
“He didn’t ask. Hasn’t asked anyone outside of Utah."
— Source close to Romney

Between the lines: Trump didn't have much of a choice. Romney will almost certainly win, likely with minimal competition. 

So Trump had three choices: He could either endorse Romney, stay silent, or oppose the man he likes to say “choked like a dog” in the 2012 election. Either of the latter two options would have resulted in cable news blaring "Utah rejects Trump" headlines after an eventual Romney win. Now Trump can claim credit for Romney's victory, and be on the side of a winner.

This lines up with the smartest take I've heard so far, from a GOP source who knows Romney well and predicted this months ago:

“This was totally predictable.  The President who (usually) has good political instincts got ahead of any stories (which Press is dying to write) about a Romney victory (primary) being a repudiation of Trump, by endorsing him so now Trump can take credit for win and say it’s because he endorsed!"

Read the article here. 

Mid-morning update: CNN helpfully provides a few more of Donald's mean tweets about Mittens:



Original post

photo credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney took some heat for accepting Donald Trump's endorsement. How did it come about? After the election, Romney-watcher, reporter and fellow Mormon McKay Coppins laid it out in an article for Buzzfeed. He starts with this:

The Romney campaign obituaries that will litter the Internet over the coming days and weeks are bound to offer varied causes of death: tactical mistakes, candidate gaffes, shifting demographics, or some poisonous mix of bad luck and blunders.

But perhaps the campaign's most fatal mistake was its tortured, 16-month quest to win the affection of rank-and-file conservatives via their most boisterous mouthpiece — at the expense of almost everything else. (Yes, the boisterous mouthpiece is Trump.) 

...includes this:

Trump's appeal to the Republican base was undeniable, and, to many on Romney's staff, utterly perplexing. Among the savvy sophisticates who populated the campaign headquarters in Boston, Trump was viewed as a joke and a blowhard — an outrageous figure whose fixation on Obama's birth certificate was, at once, bizarre and off-putting, according to campaign sources. (Yes, the "joke and a blowhard" is Trump.)  

...and finishes with this: 

…another person close to Trump said the multimillionaire's view of Romney was and is relatively similar to how much of the Republican base views him.

"Trump was obviously always genuinely anti-Obama, but he bought into the idea that as a moderate, Romney had the best chance of beating Obama," the source said. "Given the choices he had, he thought Romney."

Would they stay in touch now that the election's over?

"Trump doesn’t like to be associated with failure," the source responded. "Trump's a winner. My guess is today he’s pretty disappointed." (Yes, the failure is Mitt Romney.) 

The rest of the article is interesting too, you can read it here.

When Trump himself ran in 2016, Mitt was one of his harshest critics, giving this speech, which by-the-way, IMHO, reflect's Mitt's real feelings about Trump:


Romney also insisted, in a tweet dated March 3, 2016, that if he had known how truly horrible Donald Trump really is, he would never have accepted the endorsement: 


 Trump didn't like Mitt very much either, at that point: 



Then, to my surprise, Mitt's surprise and pretty much everyone else's surprise, The Donald was elected president. In his never-ending quest to obtain a government job, this time Secretary of State, Mitt set aside his real feelings and went to New York to kiss Trump's... ring. 

 
photo credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Was this really just petty and vindictive Donald humiliating Romney for the bad things he said about Donald during the campaign? Many people think so, including me.  

Finally, last week Mittens announced he's running to be the junior senator from Utah. Trump initially wasn't thrilled, trying to convince 83-year-old incumbent Orrin Hatch to reconsider and run again. Now that it's official, Trump has endorsed Romney: 

Apparently Mitt no longer cares about the things Trump said about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans and the disabled, because he happily accepted Trump's endorsement, again: 

In August, 2012, The Economist ran a cover story titled: "So Mitt, what do you really believe?" In the story, they pointed out that "nobody knows who this strange man really is." It's still true. 
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