The president’s allies are looking to undermine the one GOP senator who turned against Trump on impeachment — by linking Romney to Ukraine.
The MAGA machine is attempting to turn President Donald Trump’s latest nemesis — Sen. Mitt Romney — into the next Hunter Biden.
Trump in recent days took a new turn in his attacks on the Utah senator, veering from assailing his character and loyalty and tossing him into the wilds of Ukraine.
Trump over the weekend retweeted several conservative personalities and stories attempting to connect the Republican senator to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its former board member Hunter Biden, two parties at the center of Trump’s attempted quid pro quo. The allegation was featured in several far-right blog posts: A senior advisor from Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign was on Burisma’s board of directors, and that by voting to impeach Trump last week, Romney was covering for his fellow swamp crony.
While Trump’s campaign had highlighted the allegation earlier, the post-impeachment flurry of tweets was the first time that Trump himself acknowledged the theory. At one point, the president retweeted a random follower’s newfound suspicion: “Romney is covering up his part in corruption in Ukraine. This has nothing to do with truth or God. He is a desperate man. The truth will come out.”
Prior to Sunday, Trump and the GOP’s first anti-Mitt salvo centered on a familiar set of name-calling: Romney is a “failed presidential candidate” jealous that Trump won the presidency; Romney craves the attention of the liberal media; Romney, a sanctimonious do-gooder, is a coward who wears mom jeans.
The Burisma attack signaled a new front in Trump world’s attempts to punish Romney, as well as keep the Burisma narrative alive. After all, Trump’s attempted quid pro quo centered around his obsession with launching an investigation into whether Joe Biden, his ostensible rival in the 2020 election, illegally leaned on the Ukrainian government to protect his son’s board seat — a storyline Trump adamantly clung onto during his impeachment trial. Should Romney look complicit, then so much the better for explaining his vote.
…….
“It seems that some people are trying to play the political equivalent of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” to attack Romney, he said. “Using this logic, Romney must also be a secret agent for the Trump Administration since both the president’s lawyer and national security adviser served as Romney campaign advisers.”
…….
Regardless, that line of attack lingered in a series of aggregated articles on conservative blogs like The Federalist, Breitbart and Big League Politics (with the apt headline “HMM”) published that month.
Just hours after Romney voted last Wednesday to remove Trump from office on one article of impeachment, however, the allegation roared back to life — first on Twitter, highlighted by the likes of former governor Mike Huckabee, commentators Sean Davis and John Cardillo, and The Daily Wire, all retweeting or re-aggregating the Federalist and Breitbart articles.
……..
The focus on Black persisted into Thursday and Friday, with RedState and PJ Media running articles highlighting the connection, Charlie Kirk and Mark Levin tweeting their seeming suspicions, and Hannity guest host Dan Bongino expressing outrage on his show that a Romney “confidant” was connected to Burisma.
At one point, the attack line attempted to jump off the internet into the cable-sphere. Laura Ingraham started working that angle on her show on Wednesday night, showing a graphic of The Federalist’s headline about Black to Sen. Lindsey Graham.
………
“”You’re watching the conspiracy laundromat in action,” said GOP consultant and Trump critic Rick Wilson. “What they do is that they punch [a theory] out to [hypothetical] Twitter user @MagaKing907525462, and then it’ll get retweeted by some dipshit like Dan Bongino or John Cardillo, and then it’ll get picked up by Breitbart, and then the Federalist will pick up on it and then from the Federalist it’ll go to Fox. And then lather, rinse, repeat.”
…….
“They’ve recognized that no matter how tangential and ephemeral the connection, they’re going to do everything they can in order to get back into this ridiculous narrative of Burisma,” Wilson said.
…….
- Discussion
-
The MAGA machine is attempting to turn President Trump’s latest nemesis — Mitt Romney — into the next Hunter Bidenhttps://t.co/SMRPrpQBUG
— POLITICO (@politico) February 10, 2020
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.