Failing to grasp the change?

Mitt Romney still seems to think the Republican Party can return to its pre-Trump “glory.” Whereas his fellow never-Trumper, Liz Cheney appears to begrudgingly understand that the days of offering the American people establishment red vs establishment blue as their only option in presidential elections are gone for good, Romney is still pinning his hopes on a return to his idea of political normalcy.

While Cheney has endorsed and campaigned with Democrat White House hopeful Kamala Harris, Romney is shying away from any formal support for the only establishment candidate on the ballot in 2024. Why? He has a plan.

‘I Believe I Will Have Influence’

“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States, and you’re going to have to do the very difficult calculation of what that would mean,” Romney stated October 8 during a panel discussion at the University of Utah when asked why he hasn’t come out for Harris.

He then revealed his more far-reaching strategy.

“My own view is that I want to continue to have a voice in the Republican Party following this election because I think there’s a good shot that the Republican Party is going to need to be rebuilt and reoriented – either after this election or, if Donald Trump is re-elected, after he’s the president,” Romney continued. “I believe I will have influence in the party by virtue of saying it as I’ve said it.”

Romney is still fervently clinging to the idea that the America First populism that has taken root among the GOP grassroots is a temporary mirage that will quickly dissipate the moment Trump walks off the main stage, as someday he must. That it is a cult of personality, and not a sincere ideology based upon a genuine adherence to well-thought-out political beliefs.

Contrast this with Cheney, who has acknowledged that “far too much has happened that’s too damaging” to scotch-tape together the old way of doing business. Perhaps the difference between the two is geographic. Cheney in 2022 was famously hurled out of her House seat in a GOP primary rout in MAGA-rich Wyoming.  Romney, meanwhile, represents Utah in the US Senate, a state with an extremely liberal Republican governor and a bevy of GOP establishment officials in various positions of power. Though he chose not to seek re-election in 2024, perhaps wary of a primary challenge himself, Romney has been largely insulated from the humiliation inflicted upon Cheney.

Romney Chides Dems: ‘Not Because of Their Policy’

Does that account for his ability to hold onto what Liz Cheney says is an outdated vision of modern American political reality? It’s not as if Trump is a new phenomenon. He has been the dominant force among the Republican voting base for eight full years. It’s telling that in the same appearance at the University of Utah, Romney cast himself as a stout cultural conservative, as if that is all it takes for a career establishment Republican with a decades-long public record to win back a GOP base devoted to change.

“I think the reason the Democrat Party [sic] is in trouble this year and, in my opinion, will likely lose the presidential race… [is] not because of their policy, but because of the positions they’ve taken on cultural issues,” Romney said at the event, The Salt Lake Tribune reports. “They have let people talk about defunding the police and biological males going into women’s sports. And that drove a lot of people just nuts.”

Not because of their policy? The Biden administration has presided over an unprecedented national security catastrophe on America’s porous southern border while flying hundreds of thousands of “migrants” from Central and South America directly into the US heartland.

Americans have been horrified to watch their fellow citizens suffer and die after two major hurricanes wreaked destruction on the southeast US while FEMA, the federal agency charged with helping them, pleads poverty after having spent hundreds of millions on housing illegal aliens in 2024 alone and Congress apportions billions of taxpayer dollars as aid to fund foreign wars abroad.

Romney, meanwhile, has been among the loudest GOP voices in Washington backing staggering amounts of cash to Ukraine. He has repeatedly expressed his support for Democrat-backed “immigration reform” legislation that would provide “amnesty” for millions of illegal aliens residing in the US.

Yet Romney still hopes that if he wags his finger and sternly denounces a few particularly outrageous examples of progressive cultural excess, he can rebuild the red establishment vs blue establishment dynamic that is suffering under political polarization.

It may not be a sustainable political position anymore. As Liz Cheney said, too much has happened. What has been done cannot be undone. The establishment is not going away soon. There will indeed be a political realignment in America. But it will likely look nothing like a Barack Obama-Mitt Romney pillow fight. The times are far too serious.