Romney never had consistent ideological principles. He expanded government control over health care and played a role in the political rise of Donald Trump.
Utah senator Mitt Romney has announced he will not seek reelection in 2024. Though he may be remembered for his most recent role as a “reasonable” anti-Trump Republican senator, his broader career is one of political shape-shifting. He never had consistent ideological principles, he helped usher in an era of greater government control over health care, and he played a key role in the political rise of Donald Trump.
Romney, who had a successful business career in private equity, first ran for the Senate in Massachusetts in 1994, performing better in a race against Ted Kennedy than a long line of sacrificial-lamb challengers in the liberal commonwealth. During the election, he ran as a pro-choice moderate who rejected the Reagan legacy.
In 2002, following his successful stewardship of the Salt Lake City Olympics, he won the governorship of Massachusetts. His major legislative accomplishment was a massive expansion of the government role in health care, signed with a smiling Kennedy at his side. The bill, which expanded Medicaid, doled out subsidies, and forced individuals to purchase government-designed insurance on a state-run exchange, provided the blueprint for what would eventually become Obamacare.
During his runs for the presidential nomination in 2008 and 2012, he desperately sought to change his image from being an independent-minded northeastern Republican to becoming a staunch conservative (in his words, “severely conservative”). While some people can honestly change their views based on new information and life experiences, and while politicians often shift on issues for political reasons, the speed and breadth of his transformation was breathtaking. In a period of just a few years, he changed positions on guns, abortion, campaign-finance reform, immigration, and a host of other issues — and all in a direction that would be more accommodating to the Republican base. He then attacked his primary opponents for being insufficiently conservative on the same issues on which he had just reversed himself.
Initially, he saw his health-care legislation as a boost to his presidential prospects, but once the Republican electorate grew more skeptical of government-run health-care schemes and aware of its similarities to Obamacare, his plan became a liability. He responded in a variety of dishonest ways — trying, laughably, to portray his as a free-market approach and to blame Democrats for the worst parts. He boasted that it didn’t raise taxes while neglecting the fact that cost overruns in the program led to tax increases after he left office. He also liked to draw a distinction between Massachusetts’s being a statewide approach and Obamacare’s being a national one, even though he initially promoted his law as a “model for the nation.”
His support of Romneycare helped neutralize Obama’s biggest liability in seeking reelection. He also ran an uninspiring general-election campaign in which he allowed himself to be steamrolled by moderator Candy Crowley in a debate.
Romney’s weak-kneed, consultant-driven 2012 campaign is often cited as one reason why Trump’s pugilistic brand of politics took hold of the party four years later. But Romney should be remembered for facilitating Trump’s rise in a more direct way.
In February 2012, in his quest to stave off Newt Gingrich ahead of the Nevada caucuses, Romney flew to Las Vegas to accept the endorsement of Trump in person. While this would seem unremarkable now, at the time, Trump was a tabloid figure who had operated on the fringe of the political world, promoting birtherism and other conspiracy theories. Romney’s embrace of him was the first time Trump had been elevated to mainstream presidential politics in a serious way.
This was also the start of Romney’s evolving relationship of convenience with Trump. In March 2016, as Trump’s nomination looked more likely, Romney gave a well-publicized speech in which he declared Trump “a phony, a fraud” and said that it was his “very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.” Yet when Trump won, he infamously dined with Trump in a failed effort to secure the position of secretary of state. When that didn’t work and he ran for Senate in Utah in 2018, he touted his endorsement from Trump.
During his time in the U.S. Senate, Romney started to adopt the posture for which he is most recently known: that is, as an independent-minded Republican who was willing to stand up to Trump when few others in his party would. Perhaps Romney was ultimately embarrassed by his political legacy up to that point of soulless pandering. Or perhaps he never intended to serve a second term (which would put him in the Senate until age 83), and thus was finally comfortable enough to be his true self. Either way, Romney should not be remembered as a profile in political courage.