Donald Trump critic Republican senator Mitt Romney said his stance against Donald Trump has not changed since 2016 but he believes that the President-elect deserves a chance. The Utah Republican, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, told CNN that MAGA has become the Republican Party and the party is synonymous to Donald Trump today. Romney said in 2016 he felt that Trump was wrong for the country and the party and considered his win impossible but he was wrong.
“I agree with him (Trump) on a lot of policy fronts. I disagree with him on some things,” Romney said of Trump. “But it’s like, OK, give him a chance to do what he said he’s gonna do and see how it works out.”
Romney said he does not fear that his open stance against Trump would make him a target for political retribution as he believes that Trump would now try and focus on the future.
Notwithstanding his dislike for Trump, Romney said vice-president-elect JD Vance is a smart person and very well-spoken. “If you were to ask me who the nominee will be in 2028, I think it will be JD Vance, all right? He’s smart, well-spoken, part of the MAGA movement,” Romney said, downplaying past criticism of Vance as comments from “long ago,” and saying, “I’m not going to rehash history, and we’ve worked together in the Senate together since then.”
Romney said Trump deserves the credit for bringing working-class voters to the GOP from Democrats. “Look, the Republican Party has become the party of the working-class, middle-class voter, and you’ve got to give Donald Trump credit for having done that, taking that away from the Democrats,” he said.
On his unsuccessful campaign against Obama in 2012, he said Obama was ““in some respects smart to go after me and say, ‘Here’s a rich business guy, we’re going to characterize him as a plutocrat that doesn’t care about people.’ He went with that narrative, put it out there before I could really effectively respond and was successful in doing so.”
