Henry Olsen: Mitt Romney Put ‘Investors’ Profits’ over ‘American Jobs’
3:55
Henry Olsen, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, said Mitt Romney appeared to prioritize “investors’ profits” over “American jobs,” which contributed to the former Massachusetts governor’s failure to win the presidency in 2012. He offered his remarks in a Thursday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Romney described President Donald Trump as a man whose character falls short in Tuesday-published Washington Post opinion editorial: “Trump’s character falls short. … With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.”
Olsen wrote a response to Romney — published in the Washington Post on Wednesday — entitled, “Mitt Romney’s op-ed crystallizes all the reasons the old GOP establishment has been pushed aside.”
Breitbart TV
LISTEN:
Olsen added, “Romney was shocked. His pollsters told him he was going to win. They were all prepared to win, but the evidence was there all along that the people who gave Trump the presidency rejected Mitt Romney because he did not share their values.”
Olsen continued, “The biggest problem I see in Washington is that most Republican elected officials and most Republican elites still wish that this was the party where the argument was between Romney and Cruz, and it’s not.”
Olsen went on, “It’s not [between Romney and Cruz], because Donald Trump picked up the hundred-dollar bill that had been lying in front of them for about a decade, and cashed it. And that’s the hundred-dollar bill of dissatisfied blue collar workers who want a government that’s limited in its scope but active in the protection of Americans because they are Americans. They think they can put the genie back in the bottle by getting rid of the president. Well, good luck. The fact is, this is what people wanted for years. They’ve had a taste of the apple. They like it, and they’re going to expect the next Republican leader to follow suit, or they’re going to abandon the party.”
Olsen assessed left-wing proposals from self-described “democratic socialists” — including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — as unappealing to “working class” and “blue collar” Americans.
“The AOC approach is a non-starter with most of the working class,” said Olsen. “They don’t want a big government, heavy, high-tax, high-benefit state. What they want is what they had. They want their jobs back, and they want to stop being subjected to what they consider to be unfair competition. There’s nothing that AOC or her allies would do about that sort of competition [for jobs], particularly from people who come here — whether legally or illegally — and who compete with these people for the jobs.
Trump’s appeal to “working class voters” was key to winning the presidency, appraised Olsen.
“In 2016, I think the way to understand what happened was, there were really three party primaries,” judged Olsen. “There was a Democratic primary between Clinton and Sanders. There was a Republican primary between 17 people, and there was a working class primary between Sanders and Trump, and the working class voters who heard both of those people — and in most states could’ve gone either way because they don’t have party registration — overwhelmingly chose Trump, and a lot of the people who chose Sanders did so knowing that they would vote for Trump if their guy lost. There is no appeal to the AOC-type of policy among the actual working class voters.”
“There’s nothing about the left of the Democratic Party that interests the TIGRs [Trump Is Great Republicans],” concluded Olsen.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
REVOLUTION STIRS IN AMERICA
“It will more likely come on the heels of
economic dislocation and dwindling wealth to redistribute.”
*
"Between 2002 and 2015
annual earnings for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose
by only 4.5 percent, while earnings for the top 1 percent grew by
22.7 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Under the
Obama administration, more than 90 percent of income gains since the
so-called “recovery” began have gone to the top one percent."
*
“Our entire crony capitalist
system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
*
"A defining expression of
this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and
parasitism, to the point where
a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders
society’s resources in order to
further enrich itself."
“If you care about
America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s
happening in the inner city or on Wall Street. ”
TUCKER CARLSON
“Under our current system, an
American who works for a salary pays about twice the tax rate of someone who’s
living off inherited money and doesn’t work at all. We tax capital at half of
what we tax labor. It’s a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of the
richest people do. In 2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22 million
dollars in investment income. He paid a federal tax rate of 14 percent. For
normal upper-middle-class wage earners, the federal tax rate is nearly 40
percent. No wonder Romney supports the status quo.” TUCKER CARLSON
“Bain Capital all but invented
what is now a familiar business strategy: take over an existing company for a
short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract
the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned
pensions.” TUCKER
CARLSON
Tucker Carlson: Romney’s Trump Attack Indicative of a Ruling Class
Who ‘Feel No Long-Term Obligation to the People They Rule’
https://www.breitbart.com/video/2019/01/03/carlson-romneys-trump-attack-indicative-of-a-ruling-class-who-feel-no-long-term-obligation-to-the-people-they-rule/
Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host
Tucker Carlson opened the program by reacting to Sen-elect Mitt Romney’s (R-UT)
public critique of President Donald Trump.
Carlson reminded viewers of Romney’s path to prosperity at Bain
Capital and how his exploitation of the “finance-based economy” had implications on real Americans. Carlson
said it was indicative of the broader problem of how the ruling class is
harming the country overall, which led to the election of Trump.
Transcript as follows:
Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. Happy New
Year. Newly-elected Utah senator Mitt Romney kicked off 2019 with an op-ed in
the Washington Post savaging Donald Trump’s character and leadership. Romney’s
attack and Trump’s response this morning on Twitter are the latest salvos in a
longstanding personal feud between the two men. It’s even possible that Romney
is planning to challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020. We’ll
see. But for now, Romney’s piece is fascinating on its own terms. It’s a window
into how the people in charge, in both parties, see our country.
Romney’s main complaint is that Donald Trump is a mercurial and
divisive leader. That’s true of course. Beneath the personal slights, though,
Romney has a policy critique. He seems genuinely angry that Trump might pull
American troops out of the Syrian civil war. Romney doesn’t explain how staying
in Syria would benefit America. He doesn’t appear to consider that a relevant
question. More policing in the Middle East is always better. We know that.
Virtually everyone in Washington agrees.
Corporate tax cuts are also popular in Washington, and Romney is
strongly on board with those too. His piece throws a rare compliment to Trump
for cutting the corporate rate a year ago. This isn’t surprising. Romney spent
the bulk of his business career at a firm called Bain Capital. Bain
Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: take over an
existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run
up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees
without their earned pensions. Romney became
fantastically rich doing this. Meanwhile, a remarkable number of those
companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the private equity model. Our
ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It’s how they run the country.
Mitt Romney refers to unwavering support for a finance-based
economy and an internationalist foreign policy as the “mainstream Republican”
view. He’s right. For generations, Republicans have considered it their duty to
make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more
foreign wars. Modern Democrats generally support these goals. There are signs,
however, that most people do not support this, and not just in America. In
countries around the world — France, Brazil, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany,
and many others — voters are suddenly backing candidates and ideas that would
have been unimaginable just a decade ago. These are not isolated events. What
you’re watching is populations revolting against leaders who refuse to improve
their lives.
Something like this has been in happening in our country for
three years. Donald Trump rode a surge of popular discontent all the way to the
White House. Does he understand the political revolution he harnessed? Can he
reverse the economic and cultural trends that are destroying America? Those are
open questions. But they’re less relevant than we think. At some point, Donald
Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be too. The country will remain. What
kind of country will be it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live?
These are the only questions that matter. The answer used to be
obvious: the overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper
consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper
iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to
make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. Yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts
of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in
GDP is an idiot.
The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere
prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy:
Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships
with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children.
They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would if they cared. But our
leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term
obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers.
They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows.
They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our
problems.
One of the biggest lies our leaders tell is that you can
separate economics from everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for
public debate. Family and faith and culture, those are personal matters. Both
parties believe this. Members of our educated upper-middle-classes, now the
backbone of the Democratic Party, usually describe themselves as fiscally
responsible and socially moderate. In other words, functionally libertarian.
They don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets
function. Somehow they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives
and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s ability to pay
its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two totally separate
categories.
Social conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the
opposite perspective, but reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real
problem, you’ll hear them say, is that the American family is collapsing.
Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the libertarians they claim
to oppose, many social conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct. The idea
that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them.
They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy.
Both sides miss the obvious point: culture and economics are
inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive.
Thriving families make market economies possible. You can’t separate the two.
It used to be possible to deny this. Not anymore. The evidence is now
overwhelming. Consider the inner cities. Thirty years ago, conservatives looked
at Detroit or Newark and were horrified by what they saw. Conventional families
had all but disappeared in poor neighborhoods. The majority of children were
born out of wedlock. Single mothers were the rule. Crime and drugs and disorder
became universal. What caused this nightmare? Liberals didn’t want to
acknowledge the question. They were benefiting from the disaster, in the form
of reliable votes. Conservatives, though, had a ready explanation for inner
city dysfunction: big government. Decades of badly-designed social programs had
driven fathers from the home and created what they called a “culture of
poverty” that trapped people in generational decline.
There was truth in what the conservatives said. But it wasn’t
the whole story. How do we know? Because virtually the same thing has happened
decades later to an entirely different population. In many ways, rural America
now looks a lot like Detroit. This is striking because rural Americans don’t
seem to have much in common with people from the inner city. These groups have
different cultures, different traditions and political beliefs. Usually they
have different skin colors. Rural people are white conservatives, mostly. Yet
the pathologies of modern rural America are familiar to anyone who visited
downtown Baltimore in the 1980s: Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male
unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic.
Two different worlds. Similar outcomes. How did this happen?
You’d think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. Mostly
they’re not. They don’t have to be. It’s easier to import
foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are slipping
behind. But
Republicans now represent rural voters. They ought to be interested. Here’s a
big part of the answer: male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated
industry, all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that
remained in many areas were the schools and the hospitals, both traditional
employers of women. In many places, women suddenly made more than men. Before
you applaud this as a victory for feminism, consider the effects. Study after
study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want
to marry them. Maybe they should want to, but they don’t. Over big populations,
this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out of wedlock births, and all the
familiar disasters that follow: more drug and alcohol abuse, higher
incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation. This isn’t
speculation, or propaganda from the evangelicals. It’s social science. We know
it’s true. Rich people know it best of all. That’s why they get married before
they have kids. That model works. Increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the
affluent in America can afford.
And yet, and here’s the bewildering and infuriating part, those
very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all the decisions
in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get
and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight malaria in Congo. But working
to raise men’s wages in Dayton or Detroit? That’s crazy.
This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the
crisis in marriage. Our mindless cultural leaders act like it’s still 1961, and
the biggest problem American families face is that sexism is preventing
millions of housewives from becoming investment bankers or Facebook executives.
For our ruling class,
more investment banking is always the answer. They teach us it’s more virtuous
to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own
kids.
Sheryl Sandburg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandburg explained
that our first duty is to shareholders, above our own children. No surprise
there. Sandburg herself is one of America’s biggest shareholders. Propaganda
like this has made her rich. What’s remarkable is how the rest of us responded.
We didn’t question why Sandburg was saying this. We didn’t laugh in her face at
the pure absurdity of it. Our corporate media celebrated Sandburg as the leader
of a liberation movement. Her book became a bestseller: Lean In. As if putting
a corporation first is empowerment. It’s not. It’s bondage. Republicans should
say so.
They should also speak
out against the ugliest parts of our financial system. Not all commerce is
good. Why is it defensible to loan people money they can’t possibly repay? Or
charge them interest that impoverishes them? Payday loan outlets in poor
neighborhoods collect 400 percent annual interest. We’re ok with that? We
shouldn’t be. Libertarians tell us that’s how markets work: consenting adults
making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK. But it’s also
disgusting. If you care about
America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s
happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.
And by the way, if you really loved your fellow Americans, if it
would break your heart to see them high all the time. Which they are. A huge
number of our kids, especially our boys, are smoking weed constantly. You may
not realize that, because new technology has made it odorless. But it’s
everywhere. That’s not an accident. Once our leaders understood they could get
rich from marijuana, marijuana became ubiquitous. In many places, tax-hungry
politicians have legalized or decriminalized it. Former Speaker of the House
John Boehner now lobbies for the marijuana industry. His fellow Republicans
seem fine with that. “Oh, but it’s better for you than alcohol,” they tell us.
Maybe. Who cares? Talk about missing the point. Try having dinner with a
19-year-old who’s been smoking weed. The life is gone. Passive, flat, trapped
in their own heads. Do you want that for your kids? Of course not. Then why are
our leaders pushing it on us? You know the reason. Because they don’t care
about you.
When you care about people, you do your best to treat them
fairly. Our leaders don’t even try. They hand out jobs and contracts and
scholarships and slots at prestigious universities based purely on how we look.
There’s nothing less fair than that, though our tax code comes close. Under our current system, an American who works for a
salary pays about twice the tax rate of someone who’s living off inherited
money and doesn’t work at all. We tax capital at half of what we tax labor.
It’s a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of the richest people do. In
2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22 million dollars in investment
income. He paid a federal tax rate of 14 percent. For normal upper-middle-class
wage earners, the federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent. No wonder Romney
supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it’s infuriating. Our leaders
rarely mention any of this. They tell us our multi-tiered tax code is based on
the principles of the free market. Please. It’s based on laws that Congress
passed, laws that companies lobbied for in order to increase their economic
advantage. It worked well for those people, but at a big cost to everyone else.
Unfairness is profoundly divisive. When you favor one child over another, your
kids don’t hate you. They hate each other. That happens in countries too. It’s
happening in ours, probably by design. Divided countries are easier to rule.
Nothing divides us like the perception that some people are getting special
treatment. In our country, some people definitely are. Republicans should
oppose that with everything they have.
What kind of country do you want to live in? A fair country. A
decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate
the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement. A country you
might recognize when you’re old. A country that listens to young people who
don’t live in Brooklyn. A country where you can make a solid living outside of
the big cities. A country where Lewiston, Maine seems almost as important as
the west side of Los Angeles. A country where environmentalism means getting
outside and picking up the trash. A clean, orderly, stable country that
respects itself. And above all, a country where normal people with an average
education who grew up no place special can get married, and have happy kids,
and repeat unto the generations. A country that actually cares about families,
the building block of everything.
What will it take a get a country like that? Leaders who want
it. For now, those leaders will have to be Republicans. There’s no option at
this point. But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market
capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or
a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by
human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets.
Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t
worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.
Internalizing this won’t be easy for Republican leaders. They’ll
have to unlearn decades of bumper sticker-talking points and corporate
propaganda. They’ll likely lose donors in the process. Libertarians are sure to
call any deviation from market fundamentalism a form of socialism. That’s a
lie. Socialism is a disaster. It doesn’t work. It’s what we should be working
desperately to avoid. But socialism is exactly what we’re going to get, and
soon, unless a group of responsible people in our political system reforms the
American economy in a way that protects normal people.
If you
want to put America first, you’ve got to put its families first.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
Nolte:
Mitt Romney Is an Idiot
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/03/nolte-mitt-romney-is-an-idiot/
As the freshman senator from Utah, Mitt Romney is a long way
from the presidency. That has to be especially tough on a two-time presidential
loser with You-Know-Who sitting in the Oval Office, a guy who took the brass
ring by doing the exact opposite of what you did.
My opinion of Mitt Romney has
changed over the years. When he lost the Republican nomination to John McCain
in 2008, I thought he was a classy guy with a future. When he lost the general
election to Barack Obama in 2012, I thought he was a good man with a glass jaw.
When he repeatedly got on his high horse to sabotage Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign in 2016, I thought he was an opportunistic sleaze bag
gorging on sour grapes and his own monstrously selfish sense of virtue.
But now, after reading his Washington Post jihad against
Trump, I finally figured what Mitt Romney really is … an idiot.
Romney might have a high IQ, but he’s a political moron.
Let’s first dispel with the idea that Romney wrote this op-ed
out of some pressing moral need to condemn Trump’s supposed indecency. Decent
people don’t contribute to the far-left Washington Post, a
news outlet that published a
countless number of lies to
sabotage Romney, that attacks the children of
Republicans, that tells almost as many
lies as CNN.
Secondly, decent people sure as hell do not then run to a blacklisting, violence-promotinggangster
outfit like CNN to promote that op-ed, and do so specifically with a presidential-penis-obsessed serial liar like
Jake Tapper, who is so gosh-darned virtuous he remained silent as
his own audience booed a rape victim.
Oh, and let us never forget the series of fake news depth charges
CNN dropped on Romney in 2012.
So why would Romney do such a
thing? Why would Mr. Decency align himself with objectively indecent
organizations and people?
And now we come to the part
about Romney being a moron.
Just as his fellow moron John
McCain believed in 2008, I think Romney actually believes two things…
1) Sucking up to the media by
backstabbing the sitting Republican president is a path to another shot at the
Oval Office.
2) When he does run for
president again, the same media that relentlessly tarred him as a sexist,
racist, plutocrat, job-killing corporate raider who tortures dogs, bullies
gays, and gives women cancer, will appreciate him this time.
As far as number one, I think I
speak for many Republican voters, including those who vigorously supported
Romney in 2012, when I say kiss my ass. Screw you, you preening, backstabbing,
undermining, half-witted peacock whose first official act as an incoming U.S.
Senator is to sucker punch Trump, the man who not only endorsed you in
Utah, but did so graciously after you launched a series of unhinged and very personal
attacks against Trump during the 2016 campaign.
If Mitt Romney were on fire, I
wouldn’t spit on him.
And then there’s number two, Romney the Vichy Republican
betraying our president to the Washington Post and CNN and
Tapper, the worst of the worst of the worst. “Tone deaf” doesn’t even begin to
explain it.
Is there not a single one of
Mitt Romney’s handlers who can see what is going on here? Are all of these
so-called professionals so blinded by hate and arrogance that they truly cannot
grasp how their boy is being played? Do they actually believe this siren
song….?
Dear Willard:
We were so, so, so, so wrong
about you in 2012, and we are so, so sorry. The Bad Orange Man has returned us
to our senses and now we see that you are a pure and noble man who deserves to
be president. So how does this sound… Let’s bury the hatchet, you come on over,
and we’ll destroy Trump together and make you president!!!!
XXXOOO,
The Establishment Media
Although the rest of us can see
the open maw of this trap from a mile away, this nitwit still hasn’t figured
out that this charade is only about one thing — putting a Democrat back in the
White House in 2020; and the best shot the media have of accomplishing that is
if an insecure simpleton can be fooled into running a destructive primary
campaign against Trump.
And this is the best part… Even
if Romney were somehow able to win the 2020 (or even the 2024) Republican
nomination, his cowardice has doomed him with a GOP base that will never-ever
support a weasel who attacks Republicans with unbridled glee and has no stomach
to go after Democrats.
In other words… Dear
#GOPSmartSet: Past is prologue. My God, you people are stupid.
But that’s the least of it.
The media will then turn
Willard the Noble into — you guessed it — a sexist, racist, plutocrat,
job-killing corporate raider who tortures dogs, bullies gays, and gives a woman
cancer.
Honestly, what kind of
spineless, squealing little gerbil kisses up to the monsters who launched one
audacious lie after another to aggressively destroy his presidential ambitions?
What kind of mewling, bitter,
sore loser crybully allows himself to be used as a prop in the un-American
campaign to overturn the 2016 presidential election through impeachment?
I’ll tell you what kind…
An
idiot, a moron, a stupe, a sleazy stooge.
ROMNEY'S BETRAYAL
The new senator takes the low road.
“Of course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided,
resentful and angry” is because race-baiting, Islamist, class warrior
Barack Hussein Obama was president for eight long years. Romney
himself is personally to blame for Obama’s second term.
Maybe if Romney had bothered to prepare for his final two
presidential debates with Obama or put together a competent get-
out-the-vote effort the 44th president’s time in office could have
been cut short.” MATTHEW VADUM
January 3, 2019
With a singularly impressive record of failure in public life under his belt, the always-predictable virtue-signaler Willard Mitt Romney has chosen to take the low road, beginning his freshman term in the United States Senate by stabbing President Trump and his fellow Republicans in the back.
Instead of, say, waiting a brief time to get settled into his new office as Utah senator, the former Massachusetts governor, who to this day refuses to apologize for his Bay State government healthcare program that inspired Obamacare, took to the pages of the Washington Post two days before his swearing-in to attack the “character” of someone who as president has been generous, forgiving, and supportive of him.
In his Jeff Bezos-approved column, Romney embraced the leftist critique of Trump, hurling every leftist smear he could think of and bashing the president for his mastery of social media, a field Romney barely grasps.
As senator, Romney vowed to “support policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country and my state, and oppose those that are not. I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.”
Joel B. Pollak of Breitbart News provided a helpful timeline of the flip-flopping unsuccessful 2012 presidential candidate’s love-hate relationship with Trump in recent years on Twitter:
@MittRomney's "character":2012: Seeks @realDonaldTrump's endorsement, gets it.2016 (Mar.): Trashes Trump.2016 (Nov.): Crawls to Trump, asks to be [Secretary] of State.2018: Seeks Trump's backing for Senate, gets it.2019: Trashes Trump in @washingtonpost.
Firmly aligning himself with lawless, out-of-control Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Trump’s other enemies, the ungrateful Romney echoed the complaints of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and the Weekly Standard crowd, calling the president a liar and a coward.
To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.
Of course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided, resentful and angry” is because race-baiting, Islamist, class warrior Barack Hussein Obama was president for eight long years. Romney himself is personally to blame for Obama’s second term. Maybe if Romney had bothered to prepare for his final two presidential debates with Obama or put together a competent get-out-the-vote effort the 44th president’s time in office could have been cut short.
But Romney didn’t bother to fight back against Obama and allowed himself to be run over again and again by a street thug-loving community organizer from Chicagoland who never ran an honest campaign in his life.
Trump may not be perfect, but unlike Romney, the 45th president is a fighter who gets things done. Trump got historic tax cuts enacted, placed two new conservative justices on the Supreme Court, slashed government regulations, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, renegotiated NAFTA, and repealed the individual mandate in Obamacare. The wall on the U.S.-Mexico border may not yet be underway, but it is obvious that a squishified President Romney never would have been brave enough to force a government shutdown to win funding to guarantee border security.
To keep his Deep State friends happy, Romney characterized Trump honoring his campaign promise to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan as a betrayal of America’s allies, calling it “the abandonment of allies who fight beside us[.]” Romney slammed Trump for the departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, even though Mattis was infamous his dove-like posture on the mad mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Romney wrote that these foreign policy-related developments, including Trump’s 100-percent accurate claim “that America has long been a ‘sucker’ in world affairs,” have all somehow “defined his presidency down.”
Then there is Romney’s breathtakingly imbecilic reading of world affairs under Trump.
“America has long been looked to for leadership,” Romney wrote.
Our economic and military strength was part of that, of course, but our enduring commitment to principled conduct in foreign relations, and to the rights of all people to freedom and equal justice, was even more esteemed. Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world. In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 84 percent of people in Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Sweden believed the American president would “do the right thing in world affairs.” One year later, that number had fallen to 16 percent.
Romney seems to forget here that Donald Trump is not the president of Europe. How he polls in Europe is completely irrelevant to Americans.
Besides, Trump’s popularity in Europe has experienced an upswing in recent months. Trump’s name is chanted at yellow-jacket rallies in now pre-revolutionary France and at public gatherings throughout the European continent. Trumpism, for lack of a better term, is on the march worldwide, including in Brazil where Trump wannabe Jair Bolsonaro was just sworn in as that nation’s president.
Romney mocked Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, making it clear he puts the interests of other nations ahead of the United States.
“America is strongest when our arms are linked with other nations. We want a unified and strong Europe, not a disintegrating union. We want stable relationships with the nations of Asia that strengthen our mutual security and prosperity.”
It is this kind of RINO wailing and sabotage that we can look forward to on a daily basis with Mitt Romney’s arrival in the Senate.
If Donald Trump loses his reelection bid in 2020, Romney will share some of the blame.
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