Rather than pen a festive, America-loving message for Independence Day, GOP Senator and former presidential nominee Mitt Romney chose to write a dark, sad opinion piece for The Atlantic, of all places. “America is in denial,” he opines. “Too many Americans are blithely dismissing threats that could prove cataclysmic.” It’s so dark and anti-Trump that even Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson is impressed:
Romney begins by listing a long list of problems that Americans are ignoring:
Even as we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the West go dry, we keep watering our lawns, soaking our golf courses, and growing water-thirsty crops. As inflation mounts and the national debt balloons, progressive politicians vote for ever more spending.
As the ice caps melt and record temperatures make the evening news, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice.
When TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation’s southern border, many of us change the channel.
And when a renowned conservative former federal appellate judge testifies that we are already in a war for our democracy and that January 6, 2021, was a genuine constitutional crisis, MAGA loyalists snicker that he speaks slowly and celebrate that most people weren’t watching.
It reads like a transcript from a Rachel Maddow episode, for God’s sake. Who exactly is in denial about inflation? The Biden Administration, obviously, but not your average American. We know all too well the damage it is wreaking on our lives. And who changes the channel when thousands of immigrants pour across the border? (Not to mention that unless you’re watching Bill Melugin on Fox News, you’ll probably never see such video because the mainstream media rarely covers the story.)
Romney’s nemesis Donald Trump didn’t change the channel when immigration was mentioned; in fact, he worked hard to fix the problem. Biden, meanwhile, has encouraged a flood of illegal border crossings, with numbers at record highs.
It’s also hard to take Romney’s climate change diatribe seriously when, like so many other end-of-world prognosticators, he is actually a hypocrite whose lifestyle is at odds with his message. He had to sell his mega-mansion in San Diego in 2021 after receiving backlash from neighbors for demolishing the initial oceanfront structure and building a new, massive home. The house sold for a cool $23.5 million. Bet it used a lot of water in drought-stricken California.
HIs last point about Jan 6 sounds like it came off Adam Schiff’s teleprompter. Yes, bad things happened that day, and those who broke the law should be punished for it. But we are not in a “war for democracy” — just ask Ukrainians what real war looks like. Romney and the Dems can keep using the phrase over and over, which they do, but it does not make it true.
Romney goes on, but it’s mostly more of the same. He laments the “blithe dismissal” Americans give these issues, but offers little in the way of solutions. Toward the end of the mournful piece though, he drops a whopper–while also cementing his anti-Trump creds:
President Joe Biden is a genuinely good man, but he has yet been unable to break through our national malady of denial, deceit, and distrust. A return of Donald Trump would feed the sickness, probably rendering it incurable.
How to say this nicely? Joe Biden is not a genuinely good man, and he has proven it time and time again over a long career; he continues to prove it today. He plagiarized a campaign speech in 1987, he falsely accused the truck driver in the tragic crash that killed his wife and daughter of being drunk, and he basically accused Mitt Romney himself of being a racist when he infamously said in 2012, “They want to put y’all back in chains!”
I’ve never bought into the “Nice Uncle Joe” character, and always thought he was mean as a junkyard dog. Look at him now, as he dismisses suffering Americans because he believes it’s all necessary to bring on the “liberal world order.”
I used to like Mitt Romney, and–sadly– voted for him for president in 2012; I hoped his business success would make him a good leader. Since he became Utah’s senator in 2018, though, he has drifted further and further toward the Democrats, to the point where the term “Mitt Romney Republican” is considered an insult.
His dark, miserable opinion piece is not what we need from a leader, especially on the day we celebrate our nation’s independence.