Mitt Romney’s Naïve Incoherence

After listing Trump’s successful policies (“to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges”), Romney mysteriously concludes that “These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years.”  I think about at least 40 percent of the electorate might beg to differ

Victor Davis Hanson  "Mitt Romney is a fine and decent person, whom I voted for without regret, then or now, and who strangely just published a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post about President Trump days before assuming office as Utah’s newly elected junior senator. But why in the world would he reserve his invective for January, rather than in October, when it surely would have had greater force?

"As far as Romney’s calls for Trump to be less ad hominem in his retaliatory remarks, he may be right, both in terms of presidential behavior and political wisdom (given that Trump needs to capture 5-8 percent additional support from suburbanites and minorities). And he is correct to draw attention to reckless federal spending and this apparent bipartisan custom of borrowing a near trillion dollars a year. Let us hope that Romney’s proven financial sobriety will help galvanize the congress to prune reckless deficits.

"But that said, I fear that much of Romney’s invective is utterly incoherent. The departures of many top-cabinet officials in some cases were regrettable, in some understandable, but most were likely because Trump ran on an agenda neither traditionally Republican nor Democratic. Trump was the first president without either political or military experience. So there always was also going to be difficulty (and paradoxes) in matching his outsider policies with experienced insider administrators. We should, however, remember that the tenures of Department of Defense secretaries (four in the respective Obama and Truman administrations) and White House chiefs of staff (four respectively for Reagan and Clinton, five for Obama) are historically not always particularly long.

"Romney is, euphemistically, accurate in stating that he opposed Trump (“Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination”). And he explains, admirably so, that he hoped that “his [Trump’s] campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not.” And Romney was further disappointed that “on balance, his [Trump’s] conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this last month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.” . . .