Saint Mitt the Mediocre
Hagiography usually waits until someone has died, but Mitt Romney is still very much alive. In the Senate’s final vote to acquit Donald Trump of all charges, Romney became the first Senator to vote to convict and remove from office a president of their own party, with the Utah Republican citing his personal faith and the magnitude of the president’s wrongdoing in his decision.
The act was courageous, and will surely have ramifications upon Romney’s standing with the current Trump-loyal GOP. But the wave of effusive praise for Romney’s single vote from both anti-Trump Republicans and centrist Democrats oversells the actual risk he took and paves over the actual policies he represents.
Romney has been stirring this pot for weeks, and his decision to vote in favor of conviction clearly did not come as final snap judgement. Instead, his message was slickly released through a pre-taped interview with Chris Wallace at Fox News and an embargoed piece by The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, Romney’s sympathetic reporter of choice. Both were timed to come out as he was making his dramatic floor speech to the Senate. It came off flawlessly — the White House never saw it coming.
And it certainly worked: Trump loyalists and the White House are furious, and liberals are quickly moving to canonize the (still living) Romney as a saint in the same way they rushed to beautify John McCain for his vote to preserve the Affordable Care Act.
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/mitt-romney-impeachment-vote-remove-trump-948387/
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