While Mitt Romney has made himself the face of the Republican establishment opposition to Donald Trump, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee ran a campaign that foreshadowed the path that Trump would take to front-runner status in this year’s GOP primary.
Romney has been making robocalls to voters in Arizona and Utah urging them to vote against the brash businessman-turned-presidential candidate. The former Massachusetts governor last week decried “Trumpism” as associated with “racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence.” He is backing Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in a bid to deny Trump an outright majority of delegates before the convention.
But a review of the 2012 Republican primary election, however, suggests that Romney won while campaigning on some of the main themes that Trump has emphasized this year. He ran to the right of more conservative candidates on immigration while striking a populist tone on China, positions that Trump now is taking.
Trump’s self-assessment, given in the March Republican debate, is that he is a traditional Republican but “different in one primary respect, and that’s trade.” Trump has consistently called to crack down on countries that he thinks are taking advantage of the U.S. in trade, particularly China. China, he has suggested, could face up to a 45 percent tariff on goods sold in the U.S. under his administration if the Chinese government manipulates its currency.
Aggressive opposition to China was also one of the hallmarks of Romney’s campaign.
In debates and in speeches, Romney mentioned confrontation with China over its currency practices as one of his main job-creation proposals. He also instituted a rule for government spending: He would authorize spending only if “it’s worth borrowing money from China to pay for it.”
Romney’s anti-China rhetoric upset some on the Right, including the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which accused him of wanting to start a trade war with China — something it praised President Obama for avoiding. Romney’s stance was that he would label China a currency manipulator on the first day of his presidency, a move that he said would allow him to impose tariffs on Chinese goods.
“They will recognize that if they cheat, there is a price to pay,” Romney said of China in an October 2012 debate in New Hampshire.
Romney’s stridently populist positioning proved a particular challenge for his primary opponent Jon Huntsman, the former U.S. ambassador to China who defended trade with the communist nation.
“First of all, I don’t subscribe to the Don Trump school or the Mitt Romney school of international trade,” Huntsman responded during the debate. “I don’t want to find ourselves in a trade war.”
A review of the primary debates indicates that Romney was alone in consistently calling for intervention against China on trade.
Romney also prefigured Trump’s ascent within the party by diminishing his opponents with conservative populist criticisms of their records on immigration.
When Texas Gov. Rick Perry entered the race and quickly rose in the polls thanks to his conservative credentials, it was Romney who cast him as weak on stopping illegal immigration. In a September debate, Romney criticized Perry for setting up a “magnet” for illegal immigrants by offering discounts to Texas public universities for youths without legal documentation.
A flustered Perry responded with language that was received critically by conservatives, saying, “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.”
Later, in January, Romney would move further to the right on immigration by arguing for “self-deportation.” Under his administration, he suggested, illegal immigrants would be so constrained in their ability to work in the country that they would struggle financially and voluntarily move back to their home countries.
By moving to the right of the field on immigration, Romney was able to outlast Perry and a series of other conservative challengers. But not every Republican was enthused with his positioning.
“He had a crazy policy of self deportation, which was maniacal,” Trump, then just a spectator and a Romney endorser, told NewsMax in 2012. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
It would be only three years before Trump submitted a presidential campaign plan of deporting all illegal immigrants through a massive mobilization of law enforcement, building a wall to keep illegal immigrants out, and temporarily banning all Muslim immigrants, all while boasting that Republicans wouldn’t even be debating illegal immigration if he weren’t in the race.
