Trump-Romney rivalry set to take center stage again
January 3, 2018 by admin
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Donald Trump had just returned from Utah last month when the president placed a call to his longtime nemesis Mitt Romney.
Trump was ostensibly trying to ease tensions between the two men, after a trip dominated by news reports that he was courting Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to run for reelection in order to keep Romney from seeking the seat. But the 10-minute chat only further raised suspicions within Romney’s inner circle that the president was out to stymie the former GOP presidential nominee’s political ambitions.
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The president told Romney that he knew he was thinking about running. But according to one person familiar with the conversation, the details of which have not been reported before, Trump didn’t press the former Massachusetts governor about his thinking or ask why he might be interested in being a senator. Romney’s aides came away convinced the president was trying to suss out Romney’s intentions and position himself as an ally, when he’d been anything but.
The conversation highlighted the fraught relationship between the Republican heavyweights — one that will now take center stage as Romney prepares a Senate bid in the wake of Hatch’s announcement Tuesday that he won’t seek another term, contrary to Trump’s wishes. Should Romney run and win, as many expect, he will be poised to be Trump’s most prominent GOP foil, representing the wing of traditional Republicanism that the president has purposefully cast aside.
While laying the groundwork for a prospective bid, Romney has made little secret that he will be unafraid of taking on the president. The 2012 GOP nominee has informed a series of Republican Party donors, senators and power brokers in recent weeks that, while he isn’t looking to pick a fight with Trump, he is more than willing to speak out against him. During the 2016 campaign, Romney derided Trump as a “phony” and “fraud” and implored the party to nominate someone else.
Hatch’s announcement ended a weekslong staredown between Trump and Romney. Over the course of the past year, the president repeatedly urged Hatch to run again, culminating in an executive-order signing ceremony in Salt Lake City last month in which he lavished praise on the 83-year-old senator.
Aboard Air Force One, the president amped up the charm offensive, telling Hatch that no one could do the job like him. Those who spoke with Hatch, already the longest-serving Republican senator in history, said he seemed open to the idea at the time.
And during private political briefings with advisers, Trump made clear that he wanted Hatch to seek reelection.
By last week, Romney had come to believe there would not be an open seat to run for, in no small part because of the president’s lobbying campaign. Increasingly resigned to Hatch seeking another term, Romney spent the holiday weekend skiing in Park City. Romney, who hasn’t spoken with Hatch for months and didn’t attend the Salt Lake City ceremony, gossiped with his friends over text message about what the senator might do.
With doubts rising, some of Romney’s allies had begun discussing the possibility of the former governor waging a primary against the longtime incumbent. But Romney, aides said, was never committed to the idea.
Dave Hansen, a top political aide to Hatch, said the senator — who has suffered from health problems of late and had long promised his family that he wouldn’t run again — decided over the holidays to call it quits.
“I think he went back and forth about it,” Hansen said.
Through it all, Romney, who waged unsuccessful presidential bids in 2008 and 2012, made it abundantly clear to his political advisers that he was interested in a return to political life. Several people who’d spoken to Romney said that his ambition was unquenched after failing to win the White House.
“I think Mitt feels he has a lot to contribute to the world and the Senate might be a great place for him to do it, and I suspect if he does run that will be the reason,” said former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, a Romney friend who has spoken with him about a potential campaign.
But Romney is also guided by frustration with the president, which he has long spoken about openly. In June, during an appearance at his annual Park City donor retreat, the former governor grew emotional when he implicitly criticized Trump’s “America First” approach to foreign policy, arguing that the U.S. had an important humanitarian role overseas. In June 2016, speaking at the same event, Romney choked up while describing then-candidate Trump as often hurtful.
“Seeing this just breaks your heart,” he said.
Friction between the two men diminished after Trump considered Romney to be his secretary of state. But the president and his top advisers remain suspicious of Romney, who criticized Trump over the course of his first year in office. The former governor slammed the president over his handling of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, and broke with Trump after the president endorsed accused child molester Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race.
Romney is wasting little time preparing for a Senate bid, though aides say an official announcement is likely several weeks away. Among his tight-knit circle, there is already talk about who will oversee his campaign, a job that will likely fall to longtime top aides Matt Waldrip, Spencer Zwick and Beth Myers. On Tuesday, he changed his Twitter biography to specify that he now lives in Holladay, Utah, not Massachusetts.
Several other Republicans, including state Auditor John Dougall and state Rep. Daniel McCay, have been mentioned as potential candidates. But many Republicans in the state believe Romney, who is well-liked in Utah and has a sprawling fundraising network, would enter the race as the heavy favorite.
“He would not have any difficulty turning the key on his finance committee and getting it operational. His needs would be minimal,” said former Utah Republican Party Chairman Bruce Hough, who has been in touch with Romney. “He would be as close to a consensus candidate as you can get.”
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Tweet new year: Trump launches barrage of taunts and threats
January 3, 2018 by admin
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President Donald Trump has repeatedly traded barbs with Kim Jong Un since entering office. | Getty
Even as the president shifted gears from topic to topic, the day’s tweets covered a number of his regular punching bags, both foreign and domestic.
President Donald Trump used his first full work day in 2018 to rekindle one of his favorite political pastimes from 2017: throwing haymakers on Twitter.
The president returned to his full combative form Tuesday after arriving in Washington the day prior from a holiday stay in Mar-a-Lago, taunting news outlets with the prospect of awarding them for their “dishonest corrupt” coverage, threatening on social media to curb U.S. aid to Palestinians, calling for the jailing of former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and publicly competing with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over the size of their nuclear buttons.
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Even as he shifted gears from topic to topic, the day’s tweets covered a number of his regular punching bags, both foreign and domestic. The tweets and the ensuing scrutiny over them extended a streak of the president dominating news cycles by his fingertips that lasted for much of 2017 and carried into the latest holiday break.
On Tuesday evening, Trump seemingly cast aside his prior comments expressing optimism about finding a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff with North Korea, sending a warning to leader Kim Jong Un that the U.S.’s nuclear button is “much bigger more powerful one than his,” and that unlike Kim’s, his actually “works.”
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,’” the president tweeted. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
The rhetoric marked a momentary shift for Trump, who earlier Tuesday appeared to entertain the possibility that South Korea would be able to persuade the Kim government to scale back their weapons testing after the North Korean leader appeared to offer up an olive branch of sorts to their neighbor to the south during a national address.
And within 16 minutes President Trump returned to firing jabs at the media, reviving the tactic he has deployed since the early days of his presidential campaign.
The president, who spent a year berating reporters for their White House coverage tweeted Tuesday that he will be presenting “awards” Monday to what he considers to be the worst of the worst.
“I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!”
Given that there is no precedent for this, it’s not clear what he has in mind. But in November, Trump floated the idea of awarding a “fake news trophy” to media outlets to mark their “distorted” coverage of his presidency. A senior administration official said they had not heard anything about the supposed awards, only learning about the president’s announcement via Twitter.
Some journalists cited the president’s tweets in questioning whether Trump was well.
“What would we say if the leader of Germany or China or Brazil posted tweets like Trump’s? We’d say: That person is not well,” CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter remarked on Twitter.
Stelter, who said he reached out to Twitter for comment on whether the president’s tweets violated their terms of service, was met with backlash from White House social media director Dan Scavino.
“Carry on w/your night @BrianStelter. While you would love nothing more than to see a Twitter [terms of service] Violation for handle: @realDonaldTrump, you and all of your liberal friends have NOTHING,” Scavino wrote. “Keep calling TwitterStop trying to be the NEWS. Just report the NEWS try keeping it REAL!”
Earlier Tuesday, Trump kicked off his White House return by blasting the “brutal and corrupt Iranian regime” for stifling protests in the Middle East, seizing on the wave of public demonstrations in the region to criticize his predecessor Barack Obama and his signature Iran nuclear deal in an early morning missive. The comments came after hundreds of anti-government protesters were jailed in Tehran, where economic frustration has driven scores of demonstrators onto the streets.
Within the hour, the president shifted gears entirely, scorching Abedin for “disregarding basic security protocols” after the State Department released a batch of classified emails from the computer of her estranged husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, last week. In the same breath the president questioned whether the “Deep State Justice Department” would act on the revelation, giving life to the conspiracy that officials in his own administration are working to undermine the president.
The remarks were the first of a barrage of diplomatic and political taunts and threats lodged by the president on Twitter throughout the day, who weighed in on a staggering array of issues ranging from commercial aviation safety to the latest leadership shift in the New York Times newsroom to the ongoing congressional feud over protections for young undocumented immigrants.
In an unexpected twist, Trump touted that his tenure in office has been “the safest year on record” for commercial flights, despite the fact that the last death on such an airline trip was in 2009.
Trump’s wide-ranging Twitter attacks prompted a series of criticisms from former government officials.
“Donald Trump is a very dangerous man. He does not belong in the presidency,” said Richard Painter, a former lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, about Trump’s “deep state” remarks on CNN. “I’m not going to support any member of the House or Senate who continues to support this President.”
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper echoed the sentiment, calling it “reprehensible” for the president to cast longtime government officials in that light.
Former Clinton aides and allies ripped his Abedin remarks and tweeting. “Hey @jack. It’s time to kick Trump off this website,” wrote former Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon, urging the Twitter co-founder to remove the president from the platform.
Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress and a prominent Clinton supporter, wrote that she was “so filled with rage at Donald Trump” over his explosive rhetoric on North Korea.
“Words can’t describe how humiliating it is to have this person as our president,” she said.
Andrew Restuccia contributed to this report.