Mitt Romney booed and called ‘traitor’ at Utah
Republican convention
Only Republican to twice vote to impeach Trump gets
hostile reception as censure motion narrowly fails
Martin
Pengelly
@MartinPengelly
Sun 2 May
2021 12.47 BST
Mitt Romney
was loudly booed at the Utah Republican party convention on Saturday – and
called a “traitor” and a “communist” as he tried to speak.
“Aren’t you
embarrassed?” the Salt Lake City Tribune reported the Utah senator asking the
crowd of 2,100 delegates at the Maverik Center in West Valley City. “I’m a man
who says what he means, and you know I was not a fan of our last president’s
character issues.”
Romney was
the sole Republican to vote to impeach Donald Trump twice – for seeking
political dirt on opponents from Ukraine and for inciting the deadly
insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January, before which he told supporters to
“fight like hell” in support of his lie that the presidential election was
stolen by Joe Biden.
Six other
Republican senators voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment.
“You can
boo all you like,” Romney told a crowd the Tribune said spat insults “like so
many poison darts”.
“I’ve been
a Republican all my life. My dad was the governor of Michigan and I was the
Republican nominee for president in 2012.”
Romney, who
will not face re-election in 2022, was also a governor of Massachusetts and
would ordinarily be a member of the GOP establishment.
But the
party is firmly in the grip of Trump and his supporters – according to a CNN
poll this week, 70% of Republicans believe the lie that Biden did not win
enough legitimate votes to be president.
At the Utah
convention, a motion to censure Romney failed narrowly, by 798 votes to 711.
The author of the resolution, Davis county delegate Don Guymon, said Romney’s
votes to remove Trump from office “hurt the constitution and hurt the party”.
“This was a
process driven by Democrats who hated Trump,” Guymon told the Associated Press.
“Romney’s vote in the first impeachment emboldened Democrats who continued to
harass Trump.”
Some in the
crowd applauded Romney however and after the state party chair, Derek Brown,
asked delegates to show respect, the senator ended with a plea to “come
together in strength and unity”.
Emily de
Azavedo Brown, a delegate from Salt Lake county, told the AP: “If the point of
all this is to let Mitt Romney know we’re displeased with him, trust me, he
knows. Let’s not turn this into a Trump or no Trump thing. Are we a party of
principle or a party of a person?”
Other
speakers faced dissent, among them governor Spencer Cox. He told a largely
maskless crowd he knew some “hated” him for his Covid-19 mitigation measures –
but touted other moves such as banning “vaccine passports” in state government.
Private
businesses in Utah can still demand proof of vaccination.
In one of
many attacks on Biden’s attempts to pass new spending bills on top of the
$1.9tn coronavirus relief bill passed in March, Utah’s other senator, Mike Lee,
told Republicans Democrats followed “one idea: unquestionable trust in
government”.
Chris
Stewart, a congressman, told the crowd Biden was pursuing an agenda of “radical
socialism”. He also said the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, “kind of sucks”.
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