I see Mitt Romney (R-UT), Senator-elect of Utah, former governor of Massachusetts, and failed Presidential contender, has decided to be the first to the mat to wrestle control of the Republican Party from President Trump, if his op-ed in WaPo is any clue. Here’s where he reached out to the disaffected:
It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.
These are mostly long-time tenets of the Republican Party, with the exception of reforming criminal justice. He also makes a probably debatable call for fiscal responsibility. Why is it misguided? For the Republicans, it’s a talking point, useful in debates, but nothing they’ve taken seriously.
So can Romney wrest control from Trump? I doubt it. Many of the disaffected have actually left the Party, and the rest have fallen into the unfortunate mode of supporting the President regardless of whether or not his positions make sense.
But it is possible Romney is looking to start a new political party, built from those disaffected conservatives as well as conservative-leaning independents. This is a carefully crafted call to rejecting Trump on the basis of how he’s fallen from conservative ideals as well as simple competency.
Will it work? I doubt it. He does not project any recognition of some of the core problems with the conservative movement of the last forty years, and without a good dig at those cancers with the appropriate scalpel, it’s hard to see how he’ll replace Trump with himself.
