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Anonymous ID: 3cb04c Jan. 2, 2019, 10:24 a.m. No.4566607   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>6613 >>6617 >>6622 >>6624

Mitt Romney Faces Counterattacks From Trump Allies

 

Jan. 2, 2019

 

WASHINGTON —

Senator-elect Mitt Romney’s biting critique that President Trump “has not risen to the mantle of the office” touched off a series of counterattacks from Mr. Trump’s allies Wednesday and an initial effort to insulate him from a primary challenge next year, an illustration of the loyalty Mr. Trump still commands even as he enters a perilous stretch of his presidency.

 

Mr. Trump himself wasted little time in rebuking Mr. Romney for an opinion piece in the Washington Post, pointedly noting that the former Massachusetts governor lost his 2012 presidential bid. “I won big, and he didn’t,” the president tweeted on Wednesday morning. “He should be happy for all Republicans. Be a TEAM player & WIN!”

But Mr. Trump’s loyalists responded even more ferociously, and out in front was Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is also Mr. Romney’s niece. She often went by her maiden name, Romney, until Mr. Trump suggested she change it.

 

“For or an incoming Republican freshman senator to attack @realdonaldtrump as their first act feeds into what the Democrats and media want and is disappointing and unproductive,” Ms. McDaniel wrote about her uncle on Twitter.

Mr. Romney’s broadside, published just before he is to be sworn in as the junior senator from his current home state of Utah, represented the latest turn in an on-and-off political feud between the two men that dates back to Mr. Romney’s attacks on Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign. And it amounted to a blunt reminder to Mr. Trump that the one of his most outspoken Republican critics would soon have a high-profile platform in Washington — at a moment when series of investigations have engulfed the White House and Democrats are about to take control of the House.

 

Sensing the makings of a primary threat to the president, some of his most ardent backers on the R.N.C. began making the case that the party’s rules be changed to ensure Mr. Trump’s renomination in 2020.

Calling Mr. Romney’s attack “calculated political treachery,” Jevon Williams, the national committeeman from the Virgin Islands, wrote in an email to other members of the Republican National Committee that the party should move to protect Mr. Trump by amending party rules to make it harder for a challenger to have his named place in nomination at the G.O.P.’s 2020 convention..

 

And, Mr. Williams wrote, the party should use its winter meeting this month to pass a resolution endorsing Mr. Trump and declaring him “the presumptive nominee in 2020.”

 

And other Republicans saw Mr. Romney’s offensive as an opening to nurtue their ties with Mr. Trump, who keeps close tabs on who defends him in the media. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has been aggressively lobbying the president to side with his non-interventionist approach to foreign policy, scheduled an afternoon conference call with reporters to go after his soon-to-be colleague.