Romney twisting in the wind is preview of Trump’s style

Published 1:30 am Monday, November 28, 2016

By James Hohmann

The Washington Post

No conventional president-elect would tolerate Kellyanne Conway’s blistering broadside against Mitt Romney on the Sunday shows, but Donald Trump is not conventional. He’s changing how the game is played.

Americans historically choose presidents whose personalities are the opposite of their immediate predecessor. “No-drama Obama,” as David Axelrod first labeled the president during the 2008 campaign, abhors even the slightest whiff of staff-level discord. But Trump, ever the showman, enjoys drama and suspense. He likes to keep people guessing. He sees unpredictability as a virtue.

It should surprise no one that the host of “The Apprentice” would approach picking his cabinet like choosing the winner of a reality television show.

— On both CNN and ABC Sunday, Trump’s campaign manager – who is expected to land a top White House job – laid out a case against Romney that she’s surely already made in private. Over almost five minutes, Conway outlined at least eight reasons why her client/boss/patron should not choose the 2012 GOP nominee for the most important job in the cabinet. It was surreal to watch because it is so historically unusual for this to play out so publicly. The host struggled to get a word in as she relayed the following points:

Many of Trump’s core supporters “feel betrayed” that Romney is even being considered: “It’s just breathtaking in scope and intensity the type of messages I have received from all over the country.”

There will be an even bigger “backlash from the grassroots” if Romney gets the job: “I’m hearing from people who say, ‘Hey, my parents died penniless, but I gave $216 to Donald Trump’s campaign and I would feel betrayed.’ You have people saying, ‘I thought we got rid of this type.’”

The first job of a secretary of state is to be loyal, and Romney was disloyal throughout the campaign: “He gave speeches against Donald Trump. He attacked his character. … He put Ed McMullin up in Utah.”

Romney’s advisers were very mean to Trump on Twitter: “The Romney consultants … were the worst to all of us, including Mr. Trump. Their Twitter feeds were complete 100 percent anti-Trump screeds.”

Romney is a loser: “It’s Donald Trump who has shown that he has political instincts. Gov. Romney ran for the same office four years ago and lost spectacularly. … Mitt Romney lost Michigan by 10 points. Donald Trump just won it.”

There are other very good candidates, so he doesn’t need to settle for Mitt.

Romney does not actually have meaningful foreign policy experience: “In the last four years, I mean has he been around the globe doing something on behalf of the United States of which we’re unaware? Did he go and intervene in Syria, where they’re having a massive humanitarian crisis, meaning, when I say intervene, like offer to help? Has he been helpful to Mr. Netanyahu?”

Trump could extend an olive branch to the Republican establishment without actually tapping Romney: “I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure that we have to pay for that with the secretary of state position.”

— Conway subsequently engaged on Twitter with three different TV talking heads who criticized her for going off on Romney.

— These tweets underscore that this was not some off-the-cuff crack during a TV interview. Conway would not have made this case so forcefully unless she believed both that it could sway the president-elect’s thinking and that she could get away with it.

— The ongoing deliberation over who to install at Foggy Bottom therefore helps spotlight at least five of Trump’s leadership traits:

1. The president-elect likes having rival power centers, which he believes give him a mixture of advice. Trump does not want any one person (who is not related to him by blood or marriage) to have too much power – or, just as importantly, to be perceived as having too much power. We saw this dynamic at work throughout the campaign, as typified by the pitched battles between chairman Paul Manafort and manager Corey Lewandowski. It’s also clearly the goal of making Reince Priebus chief of staff and installing Stephen Bannon as chief strategist in the White House.

2. Trump is not as decisive as he wants people to think. He seems deeply torn about who to choose, just as he was during the running-mate selection process, and will probably keep changing his mind until he announces a final decision. The New York Post reported this weekend that Trump was asking random members of his Mar-a-Lago club on Thanksgiving night whether he should pick Romney or Rudy Giuliani. “One witness told us Trump took a prime table next to the fireplace in the club’s living room, but spent a lot of time greeting members and asking who they think should be his top diplomat,” Emily Smith reported.

3. People trying to influence the new president know that, unlike Obama, he actually watches cable news and the Sunday shows. Even close allies who have Trump’s ear will try to reach him by going on TV. Newt Gingrich, who Romney defeated in 2012, and Mike Huckabee, who he beat in 2008, have both gone on Fox News to say the former Massachusetts governor would be a bad pick in an effort to settle old scores. Not only has Joe Scarborough spoken out loudly against Giuliani on the assumption that Trump is watching “Morning Joe,” but Sean Hannity has come out hard against Romney during his primetime show as well.

4. Appearances matter. Trump himself has told aides that he believes Romney “looks the part.” Trump liked Romney quite a bit during their meeting two weeks ago, and multiple advisers told the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman that “he is intrigued by the possibility of such a camera-ready option to represent the country around the globe.”

5. It is not completely out of the question that Trump is making Romney go through this whole rigmarole for the sole purpose of publicly humiliating him. After Mitt auditioned for the job, and came to kiss his ring, it would be harder for him to publicly criticize the new president because it will look like he’s motivated by sour grapes from someone who got passed over. Fox News reported over the weekend that Trump wants Romney to publicly apologize for being so negative toward him during the campaign. Imagine if he did so, and then Trump announced Giuliani?

This sort of played out in miniature with Ted Cruz. Two weeks ago, Trump met with his main rival for the GOP presidential nomination. Journalists wrote stories about the Texas senator telling people he wanted to be attorney general. Then, immediately after, Trump announced he was going with Jeff Sessions for the job.

— Is Giuliani behind this? He badly wants the job, and he’s said as much in public. But a third, surprise candidate could wind up emerging from this donnybrook. David Petraeus and John Kelly, two career military men, are being mentioned by many in Trump world, as is Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, who seemed to take himself out of contention a few weeks ago when it looked like Rudy would get it.

— Some historical perspective: Ronald Reagan faced somewhat similar tensions in 1980. Hardliner loyalists like Lyn Nofziger were perturbed when the president-elect elevated ex-rivals like Jim Baker into top White House roles. One big difference is that they didn’t go on TV to warn of a backlash from the grassroots; in fact, we did not understand the full extent of the unease within his inner circle until archives opened decades later.

An important cautionary tale for Mitt: Reagan’s first secretary of state was Al Haig, who had been Richard Nixon’s final White House chief of staff. But the ex-general only lasted 18 months in the job, partly because he battled constantly with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger always had the upper hand during interagency turf fights because he had a deeper relationship with Reagan; he had been chairman of the California Republican Party when the president was elected governor in 1966.

— A serious question: Why would Romney even want this job? A diplomat tends to be most successful when allies and adversaries believe that he or she speaks directly for the president. This was the case for Condi Rice but not Colin Powell. Romney would be ineffective if foreign leaders did not think that his words carry much weight because they, hypothetically, could send intermediaries to appeal to Trump’s children who are overseeing his financial interests abroad.

— The “team of rivals” model has famously worked, of course. The term dates to Abraham Lincoln, when he put three men who had run against him for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination into the three most important cabinet posts: William Seward at State, Salmon Chase at Treasury and Edward Bates at Justice. Much more recently, Hillary Clinton had credibility and gravitas when Obama tapped her after their 2008 battle for the Democratic nomination.