Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has decided to retire at the end of his term, as the home paper urged, opening the door for Mitt Romney to run for his seat in this year’s midterms, according to CNN:
Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch announced Tuesday that he won’t seek re-election this year, clearing the way for Mitt Romney to return to the national stage by running for his seat.
He said in a social media message, “after much prayer and discussion with family and friends I’ve decided to retire at the end of this term.”
Which is quite interesting, since Mitt Romney was a leading and brutal critic of Trump during the Presidential campaign of 2016.
A mature politician would have recognized the probability of the elderly Hatch retiring, or even dying suddenly, as he’s 83 now, and begun a process of reconciling with a potentially powerful Party member that might succeed Hatch.
But Trump doesn’t appear to have that capacity. For him, the world is black or white, and nothing in between, so when Romney came out against him, Trump simply labeled him as an enemy, and then humiliated him with some empty gestures suggesting Romney might be nominated as Secretary of State, before handing that post to Tillerson, leaving Romney high and dry.
That may have been a mistake.
While Romney has a few burdens to bear, as being a member of the super-rich leaves many voters with feelings of suspicion, his burden is trivial next to the public pecadilloes of Trump, and while Trump’s base may not care about those pecadilloes, his base is not big enough to carry him in the next presidential election – or even through the various legislative challenges Trump may encounter post mid-terms. Having lost another Senatorial seat (after Sessions, for which he’s twice responsible, having selected Sessions to head the DoJ, and then backing losing candidates for the special election), Trump is looking like a loser, yet again.
Hell, Romney might even honestly reach across the aisle to work with the Democrats on major legislation. That would gall many of his GOP colleagues as well, but Romney has the wealth to push ahead and … act like an adult politician.
