Mitt Romney was passed over for secretary of state, apparently because he refused to apologize to Trump for his harsh criticisms during the campaign. At the same time Trump’s closest aides were dumping on Romney, CNN reports, “Trump raised the possibility of a public apology with Romney as a way of mollifying those critics. … He asked Romney to say publicly he was ‘wrong’ about Trump.”
And Romney wouldn’t do it.
He offered forward-looking praise for Trump — starting with the President-elect’s election-night speech. But he wouldn’t go backward and retract his words from the campaign.
Eventually, Romney’s critics persuaded Trump to look elsewhere, and on Monday he tapped ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his nominee for secretary of state.
This was really the only move for Romney, as I argued last month, given that the election result did not change anything about the truth of the multiple criticisms he leveled at Trump early this year.
Nothing that happened on Nov. 8 changes the answer to the question of whether Trump University was a scam. Trump’s taped conversation about groping women remains a disgusting sign, and just one among many, of his unapologetic amorality. An election win doesn’t change the fact that he claimed an American-born federal judge’s Mexican heritage makes him incapable of doing his job fairly.
Romney has certainly made his share of mistakes, but in refusing to renounce his moral reservations about Trump as though he had been misleading people with some kind of political hyperbole, he showed that there was a limit to how far he’d go in the quest for power. Hopefully, he won’t be the last to do so, but maybe he will.
Romney’s decision to quit while he was ahead has prompted Trump to make his most controversial (and rightly controversial) nomination yet in Rex Tillerson for secretary of state. In the Tillerson nomination battle, Trump will be doing to the rest of Republican Washington exactly what he just did to Romney — sounding them out to see whether he has to listen to or respect them during the next four or eight years.
That Trump should choose Tillerson just as stories come out about Russian interference in the election seems like a very Trumpian move. I agree with our editorial perspective that Tillerson should not just be rejected out of hand merely because he has worked with and has a personal rapport with Vladimir Putin. I don’t know enough about the status of his personal relationship with Putin to know whether Tillerson is the sort of man who will encourage Trump’s horrible instincts on Russia; or whether he will be better able to manage Putin; or even whether (the wildly optimistic scenario), given his relationship with Putin, he is the only man capable of making Trump take the threat of Putin seriously.
But if Republican senators don’t like what they hear during Tillerson’s confirmation process, or if they feel in any way unsatisfied with the answers he gives, they must not be afraid to reject him. Better to start Trump’s term with some bad intraparty feelings than to become his doormat permanently for the sake of party unity.
