The Romney speech

The purpose of this speech is to attack Donald Trump.

He accused Donald Trump of lowering the quality of discourse, but then proceeds to call him, throughout the speech, a “con man,” a “fake,” a “phony,” and a “fraud.”

He hypocritically criticizes Trump for not releasing his tax returns, but back when he was running for president it took him a long time to release his tax returns, and he used the same sort of excuses that Trump uses to delay releasing them. (But admittedly, Romney did release them in January 2012 before any primaries.) Hinting that Trump must be hiding something really bad in them is the same sort of rhetorical trick that Trump himself likes to use.

He repeats the same misrepresentations of Trump’s statements that the liberal MSM has been using against Trump. He especially hits him on the KKK thing, which is a misrepresentation of how Trump responded to an obnoxious question from CNN’s Jake Tapper whose intent was to make Trump look like a racist. He says that if Trump becomes a nominee, we will hear the KKK thing a hundred thousand times. Romney is ignoring the fact that if Rubio becomes the nominee, we will hear a hundred thousand times that he believes that women who were raped should not be allowed to have an abortion.

He attacks Trump for supporting “torture,” but as far as I can tell Trump just wants to use the same policies that George W. Bush used to get information from terrorists, and GWB was praised by Romney. Trump is just more bombastic about it.

He says that polls show that Trump can’t beat Hillary, but in early 1980, polls showed that Carter had a massive lead over Reagan, bigger than Hillary’s lead over Trump. In fact some polls have showed that Trump has an edge of Hillary in key states like Florida and Ohio. Trump’s polls would no doubt increase a lot if people like Romney supported him instead of trying to tear him down.

He accuses Trump’s economic plan of creating massive budget deficits (what they said about Reagan), but ignores the fact that Ted Cruz, whom he praises as a better candidate than Trump, is the one who says we should abolish the IRS. How much tax revenue do you think we’d collect without an agency to collect it?

He makes fun of Trump for being called “the Donald,” while ignoring the fact that people fondly called Reagan “the Gipper” based on a character he played in a movie.

Mitt Romney’s prescription for defeating Trump is that voters should vote for whichever not-Trump candidate in their state is most likely to win. Thus the real plan is to force a brokered convention where, I suppose, Romney will be selected as the nominee. (Admittedly Romney is a better nominee than any of the three non-Trumps still in the race, but if that happens Trump supporters will be pissed and Romney will lose to Hillary. I guarantee it.)