The sophisticated take on Mitt Romney’s remarkable broadside against Donald Trump’s policy positions, business acumen and personal morals this morning is that it was an unforced blunder that probably only helps Trump. After all, who more than Romney embodies the establishment that Trump’s followers so despise? Who more than Romney, who lost to Obama in a race most Republicans expected to win, embodies the lack of “winning” that Trump has so skillfully attacked? How can Romney of all people, a scion of wealth and a frequent flip-flopper, be the right person to press the case that Trump is an unprincipled silver-spooner? And didn’t Romney accept Trump’s endorsement just four short years ago?
These are good questions, but let me make a perhaps-unsophisticated counterpoint. We live in a political world where much of the Republican Party spent six months telling itself that it didn’t really need to persuade Trump voters not to vote for Trump, that his candidacy would simply fall apart on his own. Now many of those same geniuses have decided that it’s now too late to persuade voters not to vote for Trump, that they’re beyond the reach of reason, and that any attempt to talk them out of their fascination will just make them angrier and more Trump-besotted.
Which for some of them it no doubt will. But if you think your voters are about to make a catastrophic, even republic-threatening mistake, don’t you have an obligation to actually, at some point in the process, make that case to them? Just for a few weeks, at least, before you give up in dismay?
The idea that it can’t be done, that Trump voters are all locked-in lunatics with no capacity to take in new information, seems like just another version of the elite condescension toward rank and file Republicans that enabled Trump’s rise in the first place. And in that context Romney’s speech was actually an admirable, long-overdue attempt to break with that condescension, to treat primary voters as adults, to actually share with them the wide range of reasons — and Romney covered the waterfront — why Donald Trump does not deserve their trust.
Was he the best person imaginable to give the speech? No, but he might have been the best person available. He was the party’s last nominee for president. He isn’t running for president this time (we think; let’s see where things stand at the convention), so his arguments are less likely to seem flailing and self-interested. He’s still popular with Republicans, and he has a gravitas that both Cruz and Rubio lack; he’s a flip-flopper, but nobody doubts his patriotism; he can drive media attention in a way that, say, Ben Sasse cannot. And many Trump voters, believe it or not, were Romney stalwarts in the 2012 primary. (He isn’t only winning over working class Republicans; there’s a strong “we like that he’s a businessman” element to Trump’s appeal as well.) In the late fall, months into Trump’s ascendancy, the Boston Globe polled New Hampshire and found that if Romney were in the race he’d be leading Trump by 31 percent to 15 percent. The idea that he’d be automatically tuned out by those same voters now may seem intuitive, but it lacks empirical support.
Again, in an ideal world the Republican Party would have someone more effective than Romney — a successful, popular two-term president, let’s say — available to make the honest broker’s #neverTrump pitch. But we don’t live in that world; what the party has in its post-George W. Bush brokenness are various compromised figures, none of whom are ideal anti-Trumps. And I do think Romney’s speech would have been better — much better, to my mind — if he had acknowledged as much, by admitting his own mistake in accepting Trump’s endorsement four years ago, and casting his intervention now as, in part, an act of penance.
But better what he did offer than the nothing, or the outright capitulation, that many figures associated with Republican politics seem to be offering instead. The idea that Trump can’t be beaten is insane; the idea that he shouldn’t be beaten is immoral; the idea that it isn’t worth even trying to beat him is the lamest thing I’ve ever seen in politics. So good on Romney for trying: All that is necessary for the triumph of Trump, it would seem, is for party men to do nothing — while telling themselves, mournfully, that there just wasn’t anything to be done.