‘I’m not a fan of Mitt Romney. I don’t really want his advice…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump admitted on Sunday that he intentionally left Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, out of the White House’s bipartisan task force to re-open America because of Romney’s past attacks—including a vote to convict the president in the recent impeachment trial.
“Yeah it does,” Trump says when asked if he still holds a grudge against Mitt Romney after he was the only GOP senator excluded from congressional task force for reopening America.
“I’m not a fan of Mitt Romney. I don’t really want his advice,” he adds. https://t.co/XZjy4W2xnx pic.twitter.com/AbqGSJyrpE
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) April 20, 2020
Romney was the only Republican senator not invited to join the White House’s task force, which many interpreted as a sign that Trump still holds a grudge.
Although Trump endorsed Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, their relationship turned acrimonious during the 2016 election, in which Romney denounced the ascendant Republican front-runner.
That tension seemed to disappear after Trump’s election victory, when he briefly considered Romney for a job as secretary of State, and again in 2018 when Trump endorsed his Senate bid.
But Romney’s vote against Trump during impeachment seems to have permanently damaged the fraught rapport between the Mormon moderate and the outspoken Manhattan mogul.
Romney wasn’t the only one excluded from the task force. More than two dozen Democratic senators were not asked to join the group—including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., both of whom ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination on far-left progressive platforms.
The task force will help assist the states as they begin to lift social-distancing restrictions and reopen the country. The plan to reopen the country includes three different phases with nonbinding guidelines. The timeline of these phases will vary state by state, according to Trump.