Mitt Romney makes three basic points in his Washington Post op-ed: that as a senator, he will support policies he would otherwise support and oppose policies he would otherwise oppose; that Donald Trump has accelerated the coarsening of our public life, which is regrettable and important; and that Trump’s personal and administrative failings have diminished our standing internationally at a time of global upheaval.
I think the debate on the merits of his op-ed is interesting (and I agree with his argument on Trump’s character). But I’m struck by another question: What kind of Trump-critical Republican will Romney be? His op-ed has naturally drawn comparisons to Bob Corker, John McCain, and Jeff Flake, who openly defied Trump several times in the first years of his presidency. It’s also drawn comparisons to the field of 2016 Republican presidential candidates. What most of these figures have in common is that they represent the party’s bygone era, its old orthodoxies. Even if he correctly identified some of Trump’s flaws, one might argue, Romney’s criticism of Trump’s rock-’em-sock-’em tactics and his paeans to the liberal world order show that he still hasn’t grappled with the potency of Trumpish populism. Whatever the merits of his critique, it’s coming from a flawed avatar.
This was certainly true when it came to, say, Flake. But is Romney really that similar to the outgoing Arizona senator, who was wedded to a starry-eyed strain of libertarianism which has no constituency and which he didn’t seem interested in adjusting to fit his party’s shifting constituency? Though Romney may have had his missteps in 2012, he also took some positions that are now in vogue among the Trump administration and its would-be ideologists.
On immigration, recall, Romney was among the most restrictionist of the party’s candidates for the 2012 presidential nomination. He proposed mandatory E-Verify for new hires and argued that such a system would lead to attrition of the unauthorized population. When Newt Gingrich attacked him for ostensibly being “anti-immigrant,” Romney forcefully hit back in one of his finest moments of the campaign. His approach to immigration may have lacked the visceral punch of the Trump administration’s shutdowns to nowhere and its ill-fated attempt to fix the broken asylum system, but it had the virtue of being feasible. When Romney said last March that he was more of a hawk on immigration than Trump, he had a point.
Romney also broke with the party when it came to China. “In the economic arena, we must directly counter abusive Chinese practices in the areas of trade, intellectual property, and currency valuation,” he wrote in a 2012 op-ed. “I will not continue an economic relationship that rewards China’s cheating and penalizes American companies and workers.” During the primary, this earned him rebukes from several Republicans, who stressed the importance of free trade — yet it prefigured the Trump administration’s China hawkishness (and, presumably, would have remained in the Trans-Pacific Partnership to put added international pressure on China).
Romney has always been a calculating figure, having changed his positions on a number of issues a number of times. But that can have its upsides in an era of partisan realignment and shifting coalitions: Witness Marco Rubio, taking his cues from a handful of populist intellectuals and emphasizing new themes from the virtues of nationalism to the politics of work. Romney’s op-ed is not quite the manifesto Rubio’s was, and — obviously — he’s not the tribune that Trump styles himself as. Yet on certain issues, Mr. Bain Capital has been ahead of the curve, closer to Trumpish populism than his reputation would have it.
This could generate an interesting dynamic where Romney works constructively with the administration on occasion while continuing to speak out against his character flaws and his scattershot approach to maintaining alliances. I’d bet that Romney will stick to his promise to criticize Trump when Trump says things that he deems “divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions,” which means we’ll hear from him with some regularity. But he isn’t Jeff Flake, which means he might wind up being relevant for more than just his criticism of the president. Like Flake, Romney doesn’t represent the future of the GOP. Unlike Flake, he could play a constructive role in shaping it.