Decorum be damned.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is known for his stoic disposition, but he essentially counterpunched after being ridiculed by former President Donald Trump after the ex-president learned about less-restrained criticisms.
The 45th president called the Utah senator “a total loser that only a mother could love” and cut down the politician who ran for president back in 2012, according to Vanity Fair article citing an excerpt of McKay Coppins' forthcoming book Romney: A Reckoning.
POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?
Trump claimed that he is responsible for having “forced this Left Leaning RINO out of politics.”
Coppins told Brian Stelter in the piece: “I sent that statement to Mitt and hold on, I want to, I’ll just pull up the text. He wrote back, ‘Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.’
"So Mitt kind of enjoyed Trump’s response.”
Coppins said the 76-year-old Romney is wrestling with his and fellow lawmakers' complicity in giving rise to the Trump.
“He was looking back at the moments in his pursuit of the presidency that he sort of flirted with the more extreme elements of his party,” the author explained. “I think he realizes now that the mistake he made, and the mistake that a lot of the Republican establishment made, was thinking that they could basically harness the energy of the far right without succumbing to it.”
Today, Romney made a fulsome admission that he regrets supporting Trump, whom he accepted an endorsement from in 2012 when he was running for the highest office in the land against then-Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
“He wishes he didn’t do it,” Coppins said. “And I think that that’s emblematic of a lot of these these small ethical compromises that he and a lot of his party leaders made not realizing the kind of Pandora’s box they were opening.”
