Charlotte PLANTIVE -
He said he expected to be “vehemently denounced” and it did not take long. When Republican Party veteran Mitt Romney voted for US President Donald Trump to be removed from office at his impeachment trial, the backlash was fast and furious.
Trump has now lashed out at him repeatedly, and Republican loyalists have called for him to be thrown out of the party.
It was perhaps the closing chapter in Romney’s ambiguous relationship with Trump, who came to power in 2016 and has fostered a fierce sense of allegiance within the Republican Party.
Romney — rich, handsome and ideologically moderate — was formerly an admired grandee of the party. He was also its choice to take on Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, without success.
He even nearly became Trump’s first Secretary of State.
But he will now go down in the record books as the only Republican to vote to remove Trump, who was acquitted at the impeachment trial in the Senate on Wednesday.
“The president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust,” Romney said in his momentous Senate speech, slamming Trump’s conduct as “a flagrant assault” on US values.
Romney became the first senator in US history to vote to remove a president from his own party — breaking new ground after the impeachment trials of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999.
He said he had drawn on his deep Mormon faith to make “the most difficult decision” of his life.
But Trump, celebrating his acquittal, punched straight back.
“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” he said.
Trump also tweeted that if Romney had “devoted the same energy and anger to defeating a faltering Barack Obama as he sanctimoniously does to me, he could have won the election.”
Romney’s relationship with Trump has been full of ups and downs.
During Trump’s election campaign, he dismissed Trump as a “phony, a fraud.” But he was later pictured having dinner with Trump at a restaurant in New York, discussing possibly becoming secretary of state — a post he finally lost out to Rex Tillerson.
The spat erupted again as Trump faced increased pressure over being impeached for his dealings with Ukraine.
Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, described Trump’s phone call to the Ukraine president that triggered the impeachment charges as “troubling to the extreme.” — AFP
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