Photo by DonkeyHotey
By Brett Warnke
The emperor Tiberius famously retreated to Capri engaging in every torment and excess imaginable. One of his favorites was tossing his foes off the cliffs onto the rocks while, down below, his soldiers would beat the fallen bodies with oars. Now, two thousand years later, it’s not a revolution or an emboldened left that mercilessly tossed the Bush and Clinton dynasties—along with Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and now Mitt Romney off the headlands and onto the cliff rocks, it was Donald Trump.
Yes, Trump has spent the month assembling his new Wrecking Crew to tear apart 20th century’s progressive gains. And it now appears the smug ugly face of empire will be the hideous mask of Rex Tillerson, a corporate thug and climate change denier with no public service experience who led the most sinister business on earth, Exxon-Mobil. Worth $150 million personally, Tillerson helped filch Exxon $35 billion this year and could not more perfectly personify the Trump era to come.
On the left, hopefully more organizing than tears will come—just as every Trump Tower in America should be a lodestar of radical protest in the coming years, every step Tillerson takes on foreign land should be the location of climate protest, a perfect rallying for international anti-corporate forces seeking justice in wages, and an end to the corporate offensive Rex spent his career intensifying on every sad corner of the globe.
But perhaps, right here, just between us, as the media picks through Rex’s resume, we can delight in the political autopsy, the humiliating ruin of Mitt Romney.
Like a purifying storm (true, mostly thunder and mud) Trump washed away so much establishment dead wood. Admittedly, Jeff Sessions and Company are not exactly our era’s bright young things. Personnel is policy. But the most delicious part of the strange interlude between election and inauguration has not been watching Trump “save” Carrier’s jobs and thereby humiliating Clintonoid Democrats even more—stealing their historical constituency and putting his paternalism towards Midwestern working people on the front page. It has been watching Trump, like a fat orange spider, luring the clueless insect Mitt Romney into his webs.
Mitt spent the election year getting self-righteous about Donald excesses. His starched enumeration of Trumpism’s many evils could make my plants laugh, considering his 2012 antics. But in the explosion of this year, his ignominy and hackery was nearly forgotten. Honestly, do you recall when the NAACP booed him? Or do you even remember when he discussed “self-deportation” of immigrants? The “makers and takers” myth of ubermensch tycoons? The 47% of us slurping up the dole? The Convention lie, “we built it”? When Romney called for cutting off cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood? Or his endorsement of a personhood initiative, thereby giving every woman’s fertilized cell a Social Security number and nickname?
If not, it is understandable.
But now Mitt is finished.
Here in San Diego, you can walk down Mitt Romney’s neighborhood. There’s very little parking and when I was there last winter, construction hadn’t been completed on his latest multi-million dollar constructional abomination. Tags of anti-Romney graffiti smile from the wall beside a stairwell leading from his yard to his private beach. I assume in the coming years Romney will be spending more time here in the sun.
There’s some irony that Romney waited until a few days after an election to be utterly defeated and humiliated.
When I first saw him crawl and grovel at Trump Tower like he was the help, it was an absolute delight. I couldn’t believe he’d fallen for it. How could the Mormon dullard not see what was happening? I thought of Hamlet, “Oh shame! Where is thy blush?” But it was that beautiful picture that will forever burn in my memory, snapped while Romney and Trump dined over a meal that would cost a Trump voter a week’s pay. In it, Mitt gazes awkwardly back, oblivious and unaware that he is a snake that has swallowed himself. He is dimmed in shadow while Donald Trump glows like a golden mooncalf. That wineless dinner alone cost Romney any respectability that would necessitate future interviews he has recently enjoyed. In that photograph, Trump’s smile says it all: the meanest guy in the valley and a master at the vindictive, the petty, the cruel, and the humiliating, knows exactly what he’s done.
Romney jumped into 2016 thinking himself a noble Cincinnatus, returning from the rugged wilderness of San Diego to save the Republican Party from itself! In a solid speech, perhaps his best, Romney perfectly articulated the absurdity of Trump. By turning Romney from critic into slavish bootlicker and job-seeker, the President-elect has utterly neutralized his former critic and revealed (if anyone missed it) the former candidate can never again criticize Trump to any effect.
Mitt Romney is the last ruin, the most broken wreck on 2016s littered shoals. Broke on the rocks he will forever be pointed at, jeered as the soulless, spineless and unscrupulous loser we knew him to be when we rejected him in 2012. Now, the only internal opposition to Trump may come from McConnell’s Senate or Ryan’s House, both with the power to expose Trump’s many future scandals. Hoping in conservatives to overreach and self-destruct is a faint hope, but gazing at the wreck of Mitt Romney gives one hope and encouragement to grab the oars and wait at the cliff bottom.
Brett Warnke
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You’re right. I thought this myself and wondered why no one mentioned it in the main(fake)stream media. Romney has no integrity, no dignity, no self respect. You’re right, this was a chess play by Trump. Romney is now politically dead.
How can Romney have any self-respect when, after calling Trump a phony and a fraud, he goes groveling to Trump Tower begging the Big Man to give him a job?
Great Mitt Romney! An example of integrity …
Hasn’t Trump done something similar to Al Gore, by inviting Gore to talk about climate change and the need to respond to it, then hiring new department secretaries who work or lobbied for the fossil fuel industry?
Bingo, Don Wood. I thought the very same thing when I saw Gore doing the catwalk into the rump tower elevator.
I didn’t, so much. For one thing, I listened to the language, the phrases, Gore used after he came back outside and spoke about it afterward. More like diplomat-speak, I thought; which, given his background, I didn’t find all that surprising…
And, for another, he and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for their work on what’s still an “inconvenient truth” – but truth, nonetheless…
I doubt very much he believed he was at all “being played.” He’s still one of the smartest guys in the room – and the right one, especially whenever any one Republican is also present!
Via The Daily Beast:
Donald Trump’s long-time but informal adviser Roger Stone says the Secretary of State job was dangled in front of Mitt Romney in order to “torture” him for previously opposing the president-elect.
During a Sunday appearance on InfoWars with Alex Jones, a conspiratorial media outlet that has become a mouthpiece of the next president, Stone called Romney a “choker” and said that Trump was simply toying with him.
“Donald Trump was interviewing Mitt Romney for Secretary of State in order to torture him,” Stone claimed on the program. “To toy with him. And given the history, that’s completely understandable. Mitt Romney crossed a line. He didn’t just oppose Trump, which is his democratic right, he called him a phony and a fraud. And a con man. And that’s not the kind of man you want as Secretary of State.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/12/donald-trump-interviewed-mitt-romney-to-torture-him-roger-stone-says.html
That’s really the only way it makes any sense for Trump to ask Romney to the Tower. And Mitt fell for it totally. Allowed himself to be royally played. Then, back to La Jolla.
When the President-elect calls, someone as duty driven as Mitt Romney will always respond. No matter how the media spins it, Romney never recanted a word he said. Instead, he just said he had “increasing hope.” Many of us feel the same way as we have seen Trump back off of his more hateful rhetoric and strike a more conciliatory tone. The good news for Romney is that he will still have plenty of time for his beautiful wife, five sons who idolize their father, five equally adoring daughters-in-law, 20+ grandkids and counting, hundreds of millions of dollars, beautiful homes, etc. Meanwhile, everyone who watched the 2012 debates knows he was prophetic about Russia, and that time has exposed the smug naivete of Obama.
Big good work, Brett Warnke, not the least because you center on the Romans in their Imperial period. We seem to have entered our own decline with the election of Trump, when gilt and violence become our substitute for belief, and our leaders need not worry about considered action but instead place around themselves “communicators” whose opinions match those of their emperor, Donald.