Sure Seems Like Romney Got Punked into Kissing Donald Trump’s Ring
Since news broke Saturday that President-elect Donald Trump is likely to appoint Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, political observers and commentators have fallen into two camps.
The first camp consists of those who are shocked that after considering the whole dog and pony show that surrounded him for weeks, Mitt Romney won’t get the nod.
The second camp is comprised of people who are shocked that there are people who are shocked Romney won’t be Secretary of State.
<<whispers>> of course it was never going to be Mitt.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 10, 2016
The second camp is the more reasonable camp. The second camp is the one that will weather Trump’s presidency best because it is full of people who are already able to differentiate between manipulative spectacle and sincerity.
What Trump did to Romney was the equivalent of rubbing a puppy’s nose in its pee on the carpet before forcing the little dog outside to sit on the cold porch while you clean the wet patch. You want that puppy to know he caused you to be annoyed and to do a little bit of extra work. You want the little rascal to get very intimately acquainted with what made you so annoyed. Before you toss the pup out into the cold, you just want to humiliate him a little bit and reclaim your superiority. After all, for the brief second the tiny dog was using your expensive carpet as a toilet, wasn’t he the one with the power?
Okay, now it’s time to swap a few actions into the above scenario. Instead of a puppy peeing on the carpet, we have Romney giving a barnburner of a speech against Trump and then mocking him for months afterward, until Trump actually won the election. Instead of a momentarily-perturbed owner rubbing the doggy’s nose in it, we have Trump getting the former governor of Massachusetts to jump through shameful hoops and pose sheepishly for photo ops during a bunch of incrementally more humiliating meetings as he waited to learn his fate as a statesman.
Like we already went over, the puppy was always going to end up outside in the cold. The puppy was always going to be looking through the window as the house’s owner scrubbed his essence from a home that would never truly belong to him anyway.
It was obvious from the outset that forcing Romney to attend highly-publicized meetings and speak out about how well it was all going were just creative ways to punish him for his numerous insults to the President-elect during the campaign season.
Anyone who truly believed he had a shot at the Secretary of State position needs to reevaluate the way they consume news and try to become a little cleverer before January 20. It’s going to be a long four years for anybody who can’t see what sort of show was put on at Romney’s expense and how displays like that will be all too common in a Trump administration.
Donald Trump isn’t the type of person who will allow a puppy to diminish his authority. Not even once.
UPDATE — 11:48 p.m. EST:
Well, would you look at that. Romney has announced he’s no longer in the running to be Secretary of State.
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
