Donald Trump just got hit with a case of Romnesia
During the late stages of the 2012 general election, Republican nominee Mitt Romney began resorting to changing his positions and pretending he’d never said the things he’d just said. President Barack Obama responded by accusing Romney of having “Romnesia” – an apparently acute form of amnesia. Obama then joked that it was a good thing for Romney that Obamacare covered those kinds of preexisting conditions.
I bring this up now because it’s a timely reminder that Mitt Romney pretty much low-key sucks as a politician, and he was a particularly meritless presidential candidate. He has the wrong positions on nearly every political issue, and he has corrupt positions on a number of them. Romney is the same guy today that he was eight years ago: someone you wouldn’t want to vote for unless you had to. But Romney is a thousand times the man that Donald Trump will ever be, because Romney is no traitor. In fact he doesn’t take kindly to people like Trump when they participate in treasonous conspiracies against the United States, as he just showed us with his impeachment vote.
Interestingly enough, it’s now Donald Trump who appears to have gotten hit with a case of Romnesia. Late last night Trump decided that he remembered a version of the 2012 election that simply never happened. He tweeted “Had failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney devoted the same energy and anger to defeating a faltering Barack Obama as he sanctimoniously does to me, he could have won the election. Read the Transcripts!” Uh, nope. Wrong.
President Obama wasn’t faltering down the stretch in that election. Obama and Mitt Romney both passionately fought until the end. Obama essentially won the election during the second debate when he caught Romney in the act of lying about – of all things – Benghazi. But that was about as far as Romney’s villainy ever went. It’s not like Romney tried to extort a foreign country into making up a fake Obama scandal. That would have been treasonous, and Romney wasn’t willing to do that to win.
What’s unspoken here, but everyone implicitly understands it, is that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney – who certainly don’t like each other one bit – each respect each other a lot more than they respect Donald Trump. Even Trump surely understands this. The part he doesn’t get is why. He can’t figure out why Romney was willing to take the political risk of voting for removal, and why Romney was so – to use Trump’s word – sanctimonious while announcing his decision. “Sanctimonious” means that you’re claiming moral superiority over others. Romney, despite his many flaws, is morally superior to Trump. But that concept doesn’t exist to a guy like Trump, who sees morals as harmful and pointless limitations on ambition. Trump will never get why Romney is a better man than he is. And it ticks him off to no end that so many people see it that way.
