RUTHFULLY YOURS

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 44^th 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 45^th 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.