Romney admits the Trump MAGA agenda he stood to date dominates Republican Party
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GOP Senator Mitt Romney said on Sunday that MAGA Republicanism now wholly dominates the Republican Party, echoing the skepticism of those who have been waiting for some kind of “post-Trump” Republican Party to emerge.
Romney is one of Trump’s most frequent critics in the GOP and voted for the impeachment of the president-elect in 2021. This election cycle, he opted to retire from Congress rather than face an inevitable primary challenge backed by the former-and-future president.
In a lengthy live interview Sunday with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union, he said that traditional conservatism had been wholly subsumed by MAGA Republicanism within the GOP, he seemed to back away from the idea that there would be a return to the kind of neoconservative policy alignment pursued by the Republican Party under the Bush administration or embemified by Romney’s own 2014 campaign for president.
“MAGA is the Republican Party and Donald Trump is the Republican Party today,” Romney said, before going on to predict that the next election cycle would see that trend continue under whom he saw as the presumptive 2028 GOP nominee: JD Vance.
Prompting himself to ask whether the GOP should “change”, Romney stated that the Trump faction’s successful peeling-away of working class voters from the Democratic coalition would require the party’s policies to shift to align more with working-class interests, but said that it was the Democrats who were really in “trouble” as a result.
“The Democrat Party is the one in trouble. I mean, I don’t know how they recover,” said the senator. “Union guys, and gals … have left the Democratic Party.”
He went on to blame that trend on the Democrats’ embrace of transgender rights and a focus on cultural issues while the party ignored economic issues.
Romney was also asked about his prior criticism of Trump, to which he laid out how he had assumed the ex-president would lose the 2024 election: “I was wrong about that.”
“I think most people disagree with me. I’m willing to live with that,” he said of his thoughts about Trump’s fitness to lead the GOP.
The Democratic Party’s shift away from populist messaging was apparent after Kamala Harris took over the ticket in July, and has been blamed for her failure to win back reliable Democratic voters in numbers needed to defeat Donald Trump.
Numerous campaign officials have also noted, however, that Harris largely dug herself out of a pit where the party found itself after months of near-constant reminders from voters that they were concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to serve as president and disgusted with the Democratic Party for ignoring it. Still, the party suffered major losses among key demographics including younger voters, Americans without college degrees, and Latino voters — to name just a few.
The across-the-board defeat resulted in a landslide for Donald Trump in the Electoral College, while Democrats lost the Senate and the House makeup was largely unchanged.
Romney is one of many of the former president’s opponents who have essentially come around to acknowledge his ideological victory over the senator’s own wing of the party throughout 2024.
Others came around and made such admissions after Trump cleanly swept through the GOP primaries this spring, losing just one state to rival Nikki Haley.
Source: independent.co.uk
