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It took just under a decade, but Donald Trump’s debasement of the Romney political legacy is almost complete.
If Trump succeeds in his plan to oust Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel (who happens to be Mitt Romney's niece) and replace her leadership team with hand-picked successors — including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump — he will have reduced the Romney political dynasty to rubble and replaced it with his own. It's the culmination of a project years in the making that dragged the Romney name through mud all the while.
Years before Trump's rise in the GOP, Mitt Romney was a political nepo-baby whose various political campaigns benefited from his father George Romney’s reputation in the party. And though he seemed to hit his ceiling with his election loss to President Barack Obama in 2012, neither Romney nor his family were complete outcasts in the conservative movement at that point. Ahead of the 2016 election, McDaniel remained well-liked among the conservative establishment and fringe figures, and known for her fundraising prowess.
Then Trump came along. And the Romneys placated him initially — in hindsight, at their own peril.
Despite calling Trump a “con artist” during the 2016 campaign, Mitt Romney went on to kiss Trump's ring in the hope of netting a job as secretary of state. Trump, of course, made a show of this pitiful spectacle but ultimately (and rather predictably) chose not to bring Romney into his Cabinet. And so began a feud between Romney and the MAGA movement that included Romney voting as the only Republican senator in favor of impeachment but, as I see it, ended up driving the senator into retirement. Since announcing his plans not to run for re-election this year, he’s tried to reckon publicly with his complicity in Trump’s rise.
His niece Ronna hasn’t fared much better in the long run. Trump reportedly got her to stop using her maiden name because of his disdain for the senator. Then Trump got her effectively to turn the Republican National Committee over to him. He conscripted her into years of election denialism, even as she made meek public statements suggesting — rightly — that Trump’s conspiratorial claims were hurting the GOP’s election chances. And McDaniel has even used RNC resources to fund Trump’s personal legal issues. That Trump has made McDaniel the scapegoat for financial and electoral problems he created for the GOP is a brutal irony.
And what have the Romneys gotten for their convenient pro-Trump obsequiousness? Their legacy left in rubble, ostracized from a Republican Party they helped to build.
As the saying goes, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”