Republicans like Mitt Romney (R-UT), those old guard establishment GOP members who never quite signed on to their party’s descent into Trumpism, are fighting a battle to keep their party alive in some semblance of its old form. New members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) are rapidly undoing their work at the same time.
On Saturday, the beleaguered Taylor-Greene announced that she had spoken to the disgraced, twice impeached, former President Donald Trump, the man who redefined the Republican Party and shaped it to his own liking, and that he gave her his “full support.” In the past three weeks since the insurrection at the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, Greene has been exposed as having insisted the Parkland and Sandy Hook school shootings were “false flags,” stalked school shooting survivors on the streets to harass them and tell them she was carrying a concealed weapon, accused that both 9/11 and the shooting in Las Vegas that left 61 Americans dead were inside jobs, and supported a theory that Jewish political figures had used a laser beam to start the forest fires in California.
This is the new face of the GOP, and Romney doesn’t appear all that comfortable with the idea.
Romney has famously sparred with Trump over the years, standing as the only GOP senator to have voted to convict him of trying to extort a foreign country in January, 2020. Just one year later, Trump’s crimes have mounted, targeting his own country, and inspiring the kind of whack-job conspiracy theorists like Greene to seek power. It will take more than an admonition on Twitter to correct these mistakes, and it will take more than one Mitt Romney to do it.
Twitter was supportive of Romney’s disdain for what his party is becoming. Read some of their comments below:
