Mitt Romney yelled at Josh Hawley on Jan. 6 because of what he’s taken from the GOP | Opinion

In the early afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, level-headed Mitt Romney finally lost his cool. As insurrectionists advanced on the U.S. Capitol, and law enforcement officers and Secret Service agents scurried to evacuate Vice President Mike Pence to safety, the Utah senator started to yell. At Josh Hawley.

Looking back, Romney isn’t sure whether he screamed, “You’re the reason this is happening!” or maybe just, “You did this!” But the last Republican presidential nominee before Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the party realized a moment of crystal clarity amid the chaos: The brash young Missouri senator and his far-right gang who planned to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden were the cause of the unprecedented violence engulfing them. “This is what you’ve gotten, guys!” Romney bellowed.

That’s according to an eye-popping passage from journalist McKay Coppins’ upcoming book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” excerpted in The Atlantic magazine. Later that day, after the National Guard had finally put down the putsch and cleared rioters from the Senate chamber, Romney thought his extremist colleagues would surely abandon the ludicrous theater they’d rehearsed of pretending to block the ceremonial certification of the Electoral College votes.

But no. Yale Law grad Hawley took the podium that evening and played to the C-SPAN cameras, spouting what he had to know was nonsense. Trump and his minions had offered zero evidence of coordinated wrongdoing in the election’s count. Hawley, Kansas’ Roger Marshall and dozens of other elected Republicans tried to nullify millions of Americans’ legally-cast votes anyway. Or at least they made a show of it, for an all-important audience of one — Trump, who demands unflinching, usually unreciprocated, loyalty from those who serve him.

As Hawley spoke, Romney looked on from behind. Even though he wore a mask over his mouth, the disdain in his eyes was palpable to TV viewers. From Coppins:

“’They know better!’ (Romney) told me. ‘Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.’ They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz ‘were making a calculation,’ Romney told me, ‘that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.’”

Conservative media airs Trump lies to GOP voters

Hawley and his fellow travelers often rationalize parroting the various lies from Trumpworld because, gosh, that’s what the voters back home believe.

Yes, constituents believe up is down because the conservative media-entertainment machine has grown increasingly detached from reality. It’s not the viewers’ fault that Fox News aired utterly false claims about Dominion Voting Systems’ machines supposedly deleting Trump votes. It’s not regular Kansans’ shortcoming that their soon-to-be junior senator, who’s also an M.D., bizarrely pushed hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID-19, despite widespread warnings from medical authorities that it’s useless at best, and potentially harmful at worst.

Romney correctly views not setting his voters straight when they’ve been misled as patronizing, not as showing them respect. Leadership demands speaking hard truths, even when those you represent believe otherwise.

“It struck Romney that, for all their alleged populism,” Coppins writes, “Hawley and his allies seemed to take a very dim view of their Republican constituents.”

And although Jan. 6 seemed to bring several other prominent GOP figures their own moments of clarity — “All I can say is count me out,” said a dramatically exasperated Sen. Lindsey Graham that evening. “Enough is enough.” — it didn’t take long for the conservative establishment to fall back in line. Within weeks, Fox hosts started downplaying the failed coup as an almost entirely peaceful protest. And only days after declaring Trump “bears responsibility for (the) attack on Congress by mob rioters,” then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made a trip to Mar-a-Lago to grin in a photo op with the just-ousted president.

So rather than go along with the now-common GOP denial of basic facts, Romney is retiring from politics. We can’t help but also think of Missouri’s Roy Blunt, who decided not to run for Senate again in 2022 after more than a quarter-century in Washington.

Blunt is one of the 21 GOP senators Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein named as having “repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for Trump & his fitness to be POTUS.” We don’t know whether frustration at what his party has become was behind Blunt’s decision to step away from public service, but the former history teacher’s hopeful, patriotic speech at President Biden’s inauguration, just two weeks after the Capitol attack, seems more pointed today than we realized at the time:

“This is not a moment of division,” Blunt said. “It’s a moment of unification. A new administration begins and brings with it a new beginning. And with that our great national debate goes forward, and a determined democracy will continue to be essential in pursuit of a more perfect union and better future for all Americans.”

Attacks on ‘woke’ military, impeachment inquiry

Can we say we’ve come together as a nation, two and a half years later? Ex-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt took Blunt’s Senate seat, and he’s proven himself a far-right culture warrior seemingly most interested in fighting supposed “woke” diversity efforts in the military, and decrying social media sites’ feeble attempts to stamp out misinformation as “censorship.”

Meanwhile, the fragile House Republican majority has launched a Biden impeachment inquiry, which Trump proudly trumpets as retribution at his behest for his own two richly deserved impeachments. Revisionist Jan. 6 history keeps evolving even as its perpetrators continue to go to jail.

And Romney keeps taking heat from Republican voters for standing up for what’s right. Speaking at a Utah convention in 2021, “he became fixated on a red-faced woman in the front row who was furiously screaming at him while her child stood by her side.” Coppins writes.

“He paused his speech. ‘Aren’t you embarrassed?’”

Possibly not. Trump’s greatest political asset — one that’s rubbed off on too many Republicans — is that he’s utterly impervious to embarrassment. Who else could maintain sky-high popularity in his party after bragging about grabbing women by their genitals, and then being found legally liable by a jury for sexual abuse? Or after brazenly asserting — falsely — that he had every right to keep the classified documents he’s currently being prosecuted for hoarding next to a toilet at his resort? What does he have to be ashamed about?

That’s a Hawley skill, too. While running for Missouri AG, he famously appeared in a commercial attacking “politicians just climbing the ladder, using one office to get another.” Less than a year after winning that election, he launched his bid for U.S. Senate.

Utah Republicans ‘acting like wild children’

Romney confided to Coppins that he sometimes doesn’t recognize the voters he’s represented for years. As he spoke to those Utah Republicans he’d previously known as upstanding citizens, “now they were acting like wild children.” And at times, he was afraid of them:

“’There are deranged people among us,’ he told me. And in Utah, ‘people carry guns. It only takes one really disturbed person.’”

Perhaps the most palpable detail in Coppins’ account is the very real fear officials felt as they hid from rioters in the Capitol. Hawley is proud of that iconic Francis Chung photo of him raising a skinny fist in solidarity with the gathering crowds on the morning of the attack — but we’ve all seen the security camera footage of him sprinting away when they became invaders later that day.

“It was hard to dispute that the battle for the GOP’s soul had been lost,” Coppins writes. We’re not so sure about that. Political movements don’t stay viable forever, particularly when they’re largely based on celebrity and fiction. And while Trump’s mendacious bombast echoes in the words of Hawley, Schmitt, Marshall and their fellow celeb-wannabes, lies have a short shelf life. And they certainly can’t produce the results the liars keep insisting are just around the corner.

So we bemoan the retirement of Mitt Romney, just as we wish Roy Blunt had held on through whatever phase his party goes through next. But every time a Washington truth-teller decides to fold rather than fight, the battle for democracy loses a general it sorely needs. May their future replacements find the courage to uphold Republican — and American — values with honesty and character.