Sen. Mitt Romney commended President Trump on selecting someone other than him to be his secretary of state, joking that he may not have lasted more than a few weeks.
“The best personnel decision he made was not choosing me,” the Utah Republican told the New York Times.
“I would not have lasted as long as Rex Tillerson, and maybe a little longer than Anthony Scaramucci did,” he added, referring respectively to Trump’s first secretary of state and the White House communications director who was fired less than two weeks on the job.
Trump considered Romney to be the administration’s top diplomat, even though he was one of the president’s harshest critics during the 2016 presidential campaign. As payback for the criticism, Trump, who endorsed Romney in the 2012 election against President Barack Obama, has called Romney a “pompous ass” and said he should be impeached.
Romney’s wife, Ann, said her husband would have accepted the secretary of state job had Trump offered it to him instead of Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil.
Romney, 72, said in 2017 that he had even consulted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the job.
