“So nice to see RINO Mitt Romney booed off the stage at the Utah Republican State Convention,” said one-termer Donald Trump in a statement from his Florida lair where a jet plane is always fueled and at the ready lest he must seek exile in Russia to elude law enforcement, creditors, or both.
Utahans, Trump said, “are among the earliest to have figured this guy out, a stone cold loser.”
Romney lobbed back a response to Trump and Trumpism via Twitter: “As one of my Republican Senate colleagues said to me following my impeachment vote: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a member of a group that punished someone for following their conscience.’”
To the dismay of catcalling Utah Republicans, Romney’s tweet presumably does not mean he will resign from Congress if his GOP House colleagues punish Liz Cheney. And to the dismay of Democrats and a majority of independents who support the Biden agenda, Romney presumably will continue to vote against it.
Loser though?
Yes, Romney lost the presidential race to Barack Obama in 2012.
But Romney did receive more total votes than his opponent in a general election when he was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2004. He did it again when he won the U.S. Senate seat in Utah in 2018.
The only time Trump received more total votes than his opponent in a general election was … let’s see … oh right, never.
Another thing that Romney won twice was the Nevada Republican presidential caucus, in both 2008 and 2012, getting more than 50 percent of the vote both times.
Fun fact about the 2008 Nevada GOP caucus: Finishing in sixth place, with 4 percent of the vote, was Rudy Giuliani. That was the year Giuliani was going to win the presidency by ignoring all the states until Florida, which worked out exactly as planned for President Giuliani.
Ha kidding. But 2008 was also the year that a young (ha kidding again) Joe Biden was running on the Democratic side, and famously said of Giuliani during a debate, “there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9-11.” Good times.
Years later when Trump’s ugly and worst-in-history presidency was noisily and violently coming to an end amid a dizzying blizzard of Trump-spawned lies and insurrection, Giuliani was Trump’s personal attorney.
The former New York mayor was last seen begging Trump to pay the legal bills Giuliani is racking up for all the sleazeball stuff he did on behalf of his sleazeball client.
Trump raised a quarter billion dollars after the election by telling people their money would help him #StopTheSteal. Now he’s hoarding it, and for nothing cool I bet. That’s the money Giuliani wants Trump to tap.
Alas, poor Rudy, it will not come to pass. Remember Renfield, Dracula’s miserable servant who slinked around in the shadows nibbling on live spiders and flies? All those Trump-worshiping Real Americans didn’t contribute all that money to their savior because they felt sorry for Renfield.
And while Trump and his ne’er-do-well spawn are fuming and squealing about how horrible and terrible and corrupt it is that the FBI got a warrant to search Giuliani’s house while, on a separate track, voting machine companies are suing Giuiliani into oblivion, that doesn’t mean Trump will dip into his own personal wealth to help his former lawyer. For one thing, Trump is very brand-conscious, and helping someone in trouble for doing what he wanted them to do is very off-brand.
Also loyalty is a foreign concept to Trump. Ask Mike Pence.
Besides, Trump has his own money problems.
He faces mountains of debt, much of it coming due soon. And as the New York Times reported when it obtained several years of Trump’s tax returns, many of his investments were losing money, his golf courses sport the look of boondoggles, and his leading sources of income prior to winning the electoral college was not made from being a savvy and gloriously good businessman, but from pretending to be one on TV.
Trump’s net worth, however vague and ephemeral, is still for the time being estimated to be larger than Romney’s $280 million, so Trump must be right and Romney must be a “stone cold loser.”
Although to be fair to Romney and his measly $280 million, if for some reason he wanted or needed to, Romney could easily get something Trump can’t: a loan from a bank. As the Times reported in a look at Trump’s financial mess:
“His prospects grew more dire after the violence at the Capitol, when Deutsche Bank — the last mainstream bank willing to do business with Mr. Trump in recent years and his lender on Doral and the Washington hotel — said it would no longer lend to him.”
Sad!
Meanwhile, Romney’s two Nevada presidential caucus victories are not that uncommon, although typically the double victor won the presidency the first time.
Romney didn’t. In 2008, the first time Romney won the Nevada GOP caucus, he didn’t even win his party’s nomination for president. But he did win the nomination in 2012. And then he lost the state in the general election to Barack Obama. Because he’s a cold stone loser, obviously.
In fact, in the last 65 years only one presidential candidate has lost the general election in Nevada more times than Mitt Romney. Guess who?
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Hugh Jackson