Apr 11, 2023 5 min read

When Sen. Mitt Romney stepped up to criticize the criminal case against his arch-nemesis Donald Trump, he reminded us how far we’ve fallen since the cleanest-cut man in American politics failed to win the presidency just over a decade ago.

The disaffection between Utah Republican Romney and former president Trump, a rivalry between good and evil, also reminds us how we got here. It began with Romney’s poor performance during his second debate with President Barack Obama in 2012. Romney had prevailed in their first debate, but the second one, which produced Romney’s memorable “binders full of women” remark, sealed his and the nation’s fate.

Some say this was a decisive moment in Trump’s decision to run for president four years later. Romney’s weakness would prove to be Trump’s strength. If the ever-polite Romney was viewed as weak, then Trump would show Republicans how to rumble.

Trump and Romney played footsie off and on throughout that 2012 campaign season, with Trump endorsing Romney, then blaming his loss on his failure to use him (Trump) more. In Trump fashion, he turned on Romney and used him as a foil for his own ambitions. He, too, began referring to Obamacare as “Romneycare.” By January 2015, Trump said Romney didn’t deserve a second shot at the presidency because “he choked.”

You could almost hear Romney say, “Oh, yeah, well, watch this,” just before tweeting in July 2015, “The difference between @SenJohnMcCain and @realDonaldTrump: Trump shot himself down,” referring to Trump’s tasteless remark about John McCain that he preferred heroes who weren’t captured after being shot down over Vietnam.

Trump never leaves the house without a pocketful of revenge. In February 2016, he tweeted: “Mitt Romney, who was one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics, is now pushing me on tax returns. Dope!”

This can now be understood as a warning shot. After winning the presidency, Trump pretend-courted Romney as a possible secretary of state. This brief flirtation should have fooled no one, least of all Romney, but he took the bait. I confess, I did, too. My inner Pollyanna prevailed, and I reasoned for a moment that the end of enmity between the two men was not only possible but also would be good for the country.

Trump would have been smart to tap Romney, not least to appear magnanimous and to sanitize himself in the public eye. Instead, he elected to humiliate Romney by luring him to a very public dinner at the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan, only to cast him aside and give the job to Rex Tillerson. Remember him?

In 2019, just before Romney was sworn in as the freshman senator from Utah, a job for which Trump endorsed him, Romney wrote in The Washington Post that President Trump lacked the character necessary for his job. This kind of head-spinning political jujitsu isn’t so much unusual as it is, dare I say, girly. Were they flirting? Did they send each other flowers?

Evidently, Romney no longer needs Trump, so I’d say the love/hate relationship must finally be over. Even so, Trump never forgets an insult. Ever. This quality spurred him to the White House before, and it could again in 2024. How? All we have to do is look back to 2011, when Obama made Trump the butt of a series of jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. I happened to be seated directly behind Trump, within touching distance of his head, as joke after joke splatted on his plate. Yes, the punchlines were searingly funny, but I feared Trump’s head might explode from the rage plainly boiling inside.

Some say that night marked the turning point for Trump. The ultimate revenge would be to run for president and win. Michael D’Antonio, author of “The Truth About Trump,” said in a PBS “Frontline” interview that becoming president allowed Trump to “redeem himself from being humiliated by the first Black president.”

Revenge, needless to say, is a powerful motivator.

That the stars seem aligned to stop Trump in his 2024 run could prove to be a black hole for the republic. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s determination to criminalize Trump’s alleged hush money payments to an adult-film star and another woman to silence them about sexual encounters years before he entered politics could boomerang. Trump pleaded not guilty to all 34 counts in the indictment, while the rest of the country yawned. He slept with whom? When? Must we talk about Stormy Daniels during Holy Week?

Romney voiced what so many others have been thinking – that the government has overreached and Bragg has allowed political ambition to blind himself to consequences far more worrisome than Trump’s thus-far tepid campaign.

Somehow, as Bragg and the House GOP have begun wrangling over a Judiciary Committee subpoena of a former prosecutor in Bragg’s office, Trump has managed to emerge a sympathetic character persecuted by modern-day Eliot Nesses. Bragg’s thinking, perhaps, was to make any case he could, no matter how flimsy, to bring Trump down and prevent him from ever holding public office again. But he might not win.

What if he doesn’t? During wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s surrender and arraignment, excited newscasters exhausted the term “unprecedented” to describe events. But a thing once unprecedented immediately becomes a precedent. If Bragg fails and Trump’s lust for revenge proves great enough to get him back into the White House, one can only imagine what he might do with the powerful precedent Democrats have handed him.

Would that Romney were up to another run. He might just pull it off this time.

Kathleen Parker’s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.