Mitt Romney just scored big against Donald Trump

| 12:10 pm EDT October 22, 2019
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Earlier this month a key detail of Mitt Romney’s strategy against Donald Trump leaked out to the media. Romney was trying to convince Republican Senators to vote to convict and remove Trump, and he was promising to help fundraise for those Senators so they could overcome any backlash from pro-Trump constituents. Now it turns out Romney just scored big in that regard.

The big question was whether Mitt Romney was going to be able to land any major GOP fundraising heavyweights, considering the grip that Donald Trump seemingly has on the Republican National Committee. But last night CNN reported that Stephen Schwarzman, a major Trump campaign donor in the past, is hosting a fundraiser with Romney for the Republican Senators in question. Why is this important?

It suggests that Schwarzman has now gone from being pro-Trump to anti-Trump, or at least he’s hedging his bets in case Donald Trump takes a fall. If Trump had a strategy to keep major GOP donors from working with Romney, it’s already falling apart. Romney is raising money for the GOP Senators he thinks are going to vote to oust Trump, and he’ll presumably only let them have it if they go through with it. As we’ve seen time and again with the Kavanaugh debacle and elsewhere, Republican Senators are always willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder. If Romney can essentially pay them to oust Trump, they’ll consider doing it.

If you’ve been rooting for Mitt Romney to take Donald Trump down because you feel that Trump needs to be taken down, it’s okay to have mixed feelings about how this is playing out. Romney is trying to bribe some truly hideous Republican Senators like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner into selfishly ousting Trump for their own gain, in a way that could increase their odds of retaining their Senate seats in 2020. And it’s not difficult to figure out that Romney thinks if he can oust Trump, he’ll become the de facto 2020 Republican nominee, and then he’ll become President Romney.

But there’s a way for the Resistance to come out the winner across the board in all of this. If Mitt Romney does manage to bribe Republican Senators into ousting Donald Trump, we can still beat those Republican Senators at the ballot box in 2020. And if Romney does become the Republican nominee for president, we can defeat him on election day as well. If Romney is willing to help take Trump down, we can take care of the rest.