Mitt RomneyOnly Republican to twice vote to impeach Trump gets hostile reception as censure motion narrowly fails
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.
Arent 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. Im a man who says what he means, and you know I was not a fan of our last presidents 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.
Ive been a Republican all my life. My dad was the governor of Michigan and I was the Republican nominee for president in 2012.
Bush: Anglo-Saxon ideals show pro-Trump Republicans want to be extinct
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. Some in the crowd applauded and after the state party chair, Derek Brown, asked delegates to show respect, Romney ended with a plea to come together in strength and unity.
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 Bidens attempts to pass new spending bills on top of the $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill passed in March, Utahs 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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