Mitt Romney leads GOP into open war on front-runner Donald Trump

Share

The Republican Party has descended into civil war, with former presidential candidate Mitt Romney leading a charge by the GOP establishment to stop Donald Trump from winning the 2016 nomination at all costs.

If Mr. Romney and his allies succeed, most likely on the floor of the Republican National Convention, the enraged New York businessman is threatening to bolt the party and run as an independent, taking his millions of acolytes with him.

Though such a move would, from this vantage, appear to split the Republican vote and hand the election to presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, the chaos of this election season leaves only fools making predictions.

"Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud," Mr. Romney declared in a blunt and bitter speech at the University of Utah, Thursday, that burned all bridges between the 2012 Republican presidential candidate and the man who is increasingly likely to be his successor, given Mr. Trump's strong showing on Super Tuesday.

"… He's playing the American public for suckers," Mr. Romney declared. "… His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe.

"He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president."

Citing Mr. Trump's promise to deport all illegal Latino immigrants and ban all Muslims from entering the United States; his apparent reluctance to repudiate an endorsement from the Ku Klux Klan; his plans to impose tariffs on imports, which could lead to a global recession; his misogyny, his philandering and his vulgar language; his admiration for strongmen such as Russian President Vladimir Putin; his ignorance of the nuclear triad and his shaky grasp of geopolitics in the Middle East, not to mention his tendency to remember things – such as Muslims dancing in American streets after Sept. 11, 2001 – that never happened, Mr. Romney concluded: "His is not the temperament of a stable, thoughtful leader. His imagination must not be married to real power."

Mr. Romney's proposed solution for stopping Mr. Trump is for voters to back whichever candidate has the best shot at defeating him in each of the state primaries or caucuses that remain.

"This means that I would vote for [Florida Senator] Marco Rubio in Florida, for [Ohio Governor] John Kasich in Ohio, and for [Texas Senator] Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state," Mr. Romney advised.

Such a strategy could succeed in preventing Mr. Trump from amassing the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in July. If all the other candidates then rallied their delegates behind an alternative, that alternative could take the nomination away from Mr. Trump.

At a rally later in the day, Mr. Trump ripped into Mr. Romney broadside with typical vulgarity, calling him "a failed candidate" who pleaded so hard for Mr. Trump's endorsement in the 2012 campaign, "I could have said, 'Mitt, drop to your knees,' and he would have dropped to his knees."

And the reality TV star warned that if the Republican Party establishment combined to prevent his nomination, he would bolt the party and run as an independent.

"I am seeing ad, after ad, after ad put in by the establishment, knocking the hell out of me, and it's really unfair," Mr. Trump told MSNBC's Morning Joe. "But if I leave, if I go, regardless of independent, which I may do – I mean, may or may not. But if I go, I will tell you, these millions of people that joined, they're all coming with me."

The threat of such a schism is why the Republican leadership has been mostly quiet about Mr. Trump's candidacy. The hope was that he would stumble, crash, fade, peter out – something before or during the primary season.

Instead, Mr. Trump is on track to win the nomination. Whether it is because they fear a shellacking at the election – including down-ballot defeats in the Senate, House and in state contests – or simply because they believe Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy, the Republican leadership appears increasingly determined to stop him, however it divides the party.

Arizona Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, endorsed Mr. Romney's speech, Thursday, castigating Mr. Trump for his "uninformed and indeed dangerous statements on national security issues."

Earlier in the week, Speaker of House of Representatives Paul Ryan attacked Mr. Trump, without mentioning him by name, for his apparent unwillingness to condemn the Ku Klux Klan.

Also, this week, a growing number of Republican strategists, party officials and politicians, including Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, have publicly declared that they will not vote for Mr. Trump if he becomes the party's nominee.

Democrats can only be salivating at Republican infighting that surpasses even the intraparty turmoil that gripped their own party in 1968 and brought Richard Nixon to the White House.

But they must also fear the darkness of the times that would produce a Donald Trump, the anger toward elites among working- and lower-middle-class white voters that he embodies, and the threat to the republic that he represents.

As Martin Wolf warned in the Financial Times this week: "It is rash to assume constitutional constraints would survive the presidency of someone elected because he neither understands nor believes in them."