In late June, an op-ed by none other than U.S. Senate candidate Mitt Romney appeared in our own Salt Lake Tribune, and Mr. Romney finally seemed to address that that nasty dilemma stuck in Utah’s political craw: Whether to support or oppose President Donald J. Trump.
And how simple the answer turned out to be! When it comes to Trump, writes placatory Romney, praise the good and reject the bad. Well, that’s pretty reasonable, right?
But as I read Romney’s “Where I stand on the Trump agenda,” I noticed an eerie absence. In the same article that Romney writes, “if you stay silent you tacitly assent to the captain’s posture,” Romney remains wholly quiet on the issue that has come to most singularly represent the cruelty of the Trump administration: family separation at the U.S. border.
A few days earlier, Romney had told KUER’s Nicole Nixon he thought the policy “must be reversed,” but it remained strange to me that within the op-ed meant to establish his position on Trump, from whom that policy originates — and right in the midst of the border crisis — Romney would leave that critical subject untouched.
Romney’s motivation? In 2016, 46 percent of Utah voters went with Trump, but 21 percent voted for the explicitly anti-Trump Evan McMullin. Romney couldn’t risk alienating either group, so his letter had to sustain a sense of commensurability between the two. If his article were to even mention Trump’s border policy, that fiction would shatter, because Trump’s actions there are too repugnant to reject meaningfully without fully condemning the man behind them.
Claiming indisposition on the president means ignoring Trump as a symbol of white supremacy, and permitting a mainstream platform for ethno-nationalism. Romney masks his “tacit assent” for Trump’s personal character while knowing it to be the source of the administration’s inhumanity.
Given that Romney’s position on Trump has already shifted radically since his famous anti-Trump speech at the University of Utah in 2016, Romney’s present promise to go the middle road with the president is just as unreliable. Appeasing Utah’s Trump-wary Republicans is necessary to win the race but, once a senator, moderating the president will hardly take priority over retaining his place in the party of Trump, where obeisance to the president is the real fulcrum of an incumbent’s staying power.
Before today, I would have thought it too far to direct an ad-hominem against someone merely because their politics were different from mine. But this changes when that difference emerges as neglect for our most fundamental moral axioms.
Romney is an ectothermic scoundrel, bound to submit to Trump’s black ambitions as readily as any Republican politician of 2018. If we truly oppose Trump as “divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions,” as Romney himself puts it, we will vote for Romney’s opponent, who opposes Trump altogether.
Why? Because words alone will not stop atrocities.
When one of us casts a vote for Romney, we show the rest of the country that we really aren’t terribly concerned with what Trump might do to our friends and neighbors, but with how we’ll be able to talk about ourselves once it is all over.
“No, I never supported Trump. I voted for Romney. I disagreed with Trump! Well, I didn’t do anything to stop him, when he came for the children, but isn’t it enough that I disagreed with him? And civilly, moreover! Back during those days, we disagreed with that president as only Utahns could: civilly, politely, respectably, mildly and meekly.”
And the meek shall inherit the earth.
Atticus Edwards is an honors student studying philosophy at the University Of Utah.