24 November 2019

Mitt-In-The-Middle: Caught Between Kellyanne & The Donald

The 2012 GOP's Candidate for President joined a whole cast of characters in the Cabinet Room as a distraction to days of hearings on possible impeachment of the President. 
Here's an image taken this article  by Philip Rucker in yesterday afternoon's The Washington Post (online) with this caption
"Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), flanked by President Trump and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, speaks at a White House meeting on electronic cigarettes on Friday."  (Photo Credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
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Looks like Mitt has been subjugated to getting used as a prop during and after many hours of House hearings on impeachment. The outspoken Utah Senator is - from all new appearances - no longer an outspoken dissident in Trump’s Republican Party.
Even back on 17 January 2019 a  Bloomberg Opinion piece by Eli Lake captured his cowering character:
Mitt Romney Fails His First Test on Russia
"John McCain was willing to vote against Trump, but Utah’s junior senator doesn’t seem quite ready. . .  The GOP's 2012 presidential nominee memorably warned that Russia was America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” That guy was on to something. I wonder what happened to him."
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FAST-FORWARD to October 2019:
Mitt Romney In The Middle of An Impeachment Fight
The Liberation of Mitt Romney
The newly rebellious senator has become an outspoken dissident in Trump’s Republican Party, just in time for the president’s impeachment trial.
"Mitt Romney is leaning forward in his chair, his eyes flashing, his voice sharp.
It’s a strange look for the 72-year-old senator, who typically affects a measured, somber tone when discussing Donald Trump’s various moral deficiencies. But after weeks of escalating combat with the president—over Ukraine, and China, and Syria, and impeachment—the gentleman from Utah suddenly appears ready to unload . . ."
"To Romney, Trump’s performance as president is inextricably tangled up in his character. “Berating another person, or calling them names, or demeaning a class of people, not telling the truth—those are not private things,” he says, adding: “If during the campaign you pay a porn star $130,000, that now comes into the public domain.”
. . . Romney has emerged as an outspoken dissident in Trump’s Republican Party. In just the past few weeks, he has denounced the president’s attempts to solicit dirt on political rivals from foreign governments as “wrong and appalling”; suggested that his fellow Republicans are looking the other way out of a desire for power; . .
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.
. . . 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. . .
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POST NOTE: MITT ROMNEY THE TWITTER TROLL 
After this story was published, Slate identified a Twitter account using the name Pierre Delecto that seemed to match the senator’s description of his lurker account. When the reporter for The Atlantic spoke to Romney on the phone Sunday night, his only response was, “C'est moi.”)
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On 22 November 2019 (Friday marked two days in a row that Romney has sat down with Trump) The Salt Lake City-based Desert News was asking:
Mitt Romney met with Donald Trump twice in two days — why?