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Romney gets his Mitts into thumping Trump Mitt Romney, the avatar of the old-style GOP establishment, took to the podium on Thursday to eviscerate Donald Trump as a liar and a fraud. Strong words, but are they enough to halt Trump’s relentless march towar

Romney gets his Mitts into thumping Trump Mitt Romney, the avatar of the old-style GOP establishment, took to the podium on Thursday to eviscerate Donald Trump as a liar and a fraud. Strong words, but are they enough to halt Trump’s relentless march towar

Mitt Romney, the avatar of the old-style GOP establishment, took to the podium on Thursday to eviscerate Donald Trump as a liar and a fraud. Strong words, but are they enough to halt Trump’s relentless march towards the nomination? By J BROOKS SPECTOR.

In this most extraordinary of American election years, yet another unique, unparalleled, unbelievable, mind-boggling event happened on Thursday. This time it was in a university auditorium in Salt Lake City, Utah, a place where Republican values usually seem to have been genetically embedded in almost everyone. Promptly at 9:30 on the campus of the University of Utah, 2012 Republican presidential candidate (and former Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney stood up to read the riot act to Donald Trump, denouncing him as a phony and a fraud.

With his anger palpable via the television screen, Romney ran the table on Trump’s behaviour, his campaign, and his monstrous policy proposals (such as they have been) and, ultimately, the deep flaws in the candidate’s very soul, just for good measure.

Watch: Mitt Romney Full Speech on ‘State of the 2016 Presidential Race’

Ronald Reagan famously said (usually with a chuckle), that the Bible’s 11th commandment was: “Thou shalt not say anything bad about a fellow Republican.” But with Romney’s hastily scheduled appearance before an audience of about 700 people and on every television network in the country (and around the globe), that particular bit of those venerable GOP stone tablets has now been ground into molecular dust.

Instead, as the Washington Post described his speech, Romney said it plainly: “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,’ he told nearly 700 people at the University of Utah. ‘His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat…

From issues domestic and foreign to those of moral character and temperament, Romney called Trump ill-qualified to serve as president. His remarks to the university’s Hinckley Institute of Politics called out Trump for his many failed businesses, including airlines, vodka and a mortgage company. He raised concerns about Trump’s sexual exploits, his three marriages and his taunts towards the disabled, Mexican immigrants and female journalists and politicians. ‘But you say, ‘Wait, wait, wait, isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?’’ Romney said. ‘No, he isn’t. And no, he doesn’t.

The 18-minute address was unlike anything other GOP presidential candidates have delivered. It served as a public airing of concerns Romney has shared in brief spurts on social media or privately to friends and supporters. The speech came at a critical juncture for the Republican Party, with Trump’s seemingly unstoppable march to the nomination setting off panic this week among party leaders fearful that the New Yorker’s ascendance could cost them the general election, spoil the chances for down-ballot candidates and irreparably tarnish the party’s brand.

Romney’s verbal whipping of a seemingly unstoppable force of nature has actually been part of a growing chorus of lamentation over Trump’s victories in various primaries and caucuses across the US. In the past several weeks, Jeb Bush, before he dropped out of the race, had begun to characterise Trump as an appalling candidate, although that seemingly had little impact on the voting in recent primaries. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, another candidate still in the hunt, began insulting and mocking Trump in his public appearances, but that too seemed to have little effect on the Trump advance. In the days before Romney’s speech, a growing number of usually GOP-leaning columnists had similarly voiced their distress over the possibility Donald Trump would be at the top of the ballot for their favoured party in the November election.

And then, just before Romney’s outrage, a letter signed by dozens of GOP stalwarts with decades — maybe centuries — of service as foreign policy appointees, aides and advisors to Republican presidents was released. In this open letter, in yet another unparalleled statement of opinion and dire consequences of a Trump victory, they had written, “Mr Trump’s own statements lead us to conclude that as president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world. “Furthermore, his expansive view of how presidential power should be wielded against his detractors poses a distinct threat to civil liberty in the United States. Therefore, as committed and loyal Republicans, we are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr Trump at its head. We commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.” None of the co-signers should expect a call for service in a Trump administration, should that come to pass.

So far, right up until Romney made his cri de coeur to save the soul of his party, all of those other lamentations had failed to set out a concrete strategy for stopping Trump, beyond hoping lightning would strike The Donald in mid-bombast. But while recognising the hour was truly late, Romney declined to pick a favourite among the three other remaining candidates – Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or John Kasich – even as he signalled he was not available for a Draft Mitt movement at the nominating convention in Cleveland in July. Instead, he called on Republican primary voters to support one favourite in each remaining state poll, rather than splitting up their votes among the three other remaining candidates. He argued that Republican voters should support Rubio in Florida’s upcoming primary, just as they should throw all their support to John Kasich in Ohio’s poll and then, in each of the other states, pick one candidate best positioned to deny Trump votes on his way to an increasingly likely triumph.

What Romney seems to be wishing for, given it is increasingly likely that none of Rubio, Cruz nor Kasich can catch Trump in raw delegate counts from the remaining primaries, is that the strategy he laid out would ensure no candidate (i.e. Donald Trump) holds a majority of the delegates by the time of the nominating convention. That, in turn, would mean a brokered convention with some serious dealmaking in and among those now-smoke-free rooms.

An irony in that, of course, is that it would seem to be a denial of the presumably more democratic process now generating the Trump tsunami. Carrying out Romney’s scenario would, he is saying, be in the interest of preserving what Romney sees as his party’s core values, ensuring the GOP does not become handmaiden to a would-be demagogic, nativist populist – and would, presumably, also avoid bringing defeat down upon the heads of scads of other Republican candidates for local, state and national offices, all of whose names would otherwise appear on the same ballot with Trump.

Michael Tomasky, writing in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books, summed up the motor driving many Trump supporters, saying, “For conservatives, for about the same period of time, the main worry has been what is broadly called ‘culture’, by which we really mean the anger and resentment felt by older white Americans about the fact that the country is no longer “theirs” and that their former status and authority no longer seem what they once were. This rubric takes in a number of issues—immigration, especially illegal immigration; same-sex marriage; a black president in the White House; all the things that conservatives bundle under the reviled label “political correctness. In their minds it is some sort of taint that has infected every institution in this once-great nation and is destroying it daily before their eyes.”

If such a description is accurately set out, it is possible, however, that these critiques of the Trump victory march and the man’s values, such as Romney’s, may actually drive some still-fence-sitting GOP voters in future primaries to support Trump instead of someone else, sensing that the so-called Republican establishment is now trying to steal the nomination away from their “peasant revolt”, and away from the one man who tells things like they are; who speaks truth about a lying, duplicitous government; and who will turn back the forces of defeat and failure and “make America great again”.

(That GOP establishment, it should be noted, despite its presumed power, has performed in a particularly feckless and ineffectual way in allowing Trump so much oxygen in the first place, and then in failing to put up any kind of real fight against him until the clock has now come close to running out.)

Romney’s critique on Thursday of that trumped-up version of a candidate and his character, business, and policy flaws may even backfire — adding to Trump’s support rather than detracting from it, given Romney’s place in Republican lore and his reputation, courtesy of Donald Trump, as a certified, grade A “loser”.

There will, of course, be an almost immediate test of Romney’s goal-line defence strategy against Trump-ism, what with Republican primaries and caucuses scattered in the days from 5-22 March. These are scattered over 17 more states and territories: Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Guam, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Arizona, and Utah. Michigan, Illinois, Florida and Ohio are the biggest prizes in population and delegate terms, and the results in those four big states would seem to represent the real test of Romney’s strategy should the Trump advance continue unabated until the end of March. DM

Photo: Former Massachusetts Governor and 2012 United States Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, gives a speech at the Hinckley Institute of Politics on the campus of the University of Utah denouncing Donald Trump, in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, 03 March 2016. EPA/Tom Smart.

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